Well, welcome to life in a democracy. Nothing is ever settled with finality because there are plenty of ways for future generations to change the laws we cherish today--for good or ill.
We could revoke the 13th and 14th Amendments and have slavery again--there is no legal impediment to that. That we don't do that is a reflection of our cultural values--today--which we continually discuss and reinforce.
We could abolish the EPA, or the IRS, or the NSA. We don't because these have enough supporters who value what they do, today. The 2nd Amendment remains strong today because millions of Americans work every day to keep it that way.
So, the long-term solution for strong encryption must be a cultural one. We have to be prepared to fight the crypto wars forever, like unions are still fighting the labor wars a century later. Like civil rights activists are fighting racism even today--and will be for the foreseeable future.
Is that depressing? Not to me; I find it inspiring, much better than a world in which government decisions are truly final. Beware that level of power IMO.
The problem is not that things change in a democracy. The problem is that the change we get does not represent the will of the people.
A majority of Americans is dissatisfied with the Patriot Act [1] yet it keeps getting renewed.
A majority of Americans thinks political spending is corrupt [2] and that the political system is rigged, yet we get Citizens United to pour even more corporate cash into the machine.
A majority of Americans voted for the Democrat in 2000, but the Republican was installed instead [3].
People overwhelmingly disapprove using public funds to bail out reckless bankers [4], but somehow it happens anyway.
There was a global uproar over SOPA and PIPA which shut down this draconian legislation. But you can't kill the zombie, and it keeps coming back, now in secret trade agreements like TPP and TTIP that citizens aren't even allowed to read.
The Total Information Awareness program was suspended in 2003 [5] after a public outcry over warrantless mass surveillance. Naturally it was all reincarnated into secret NSA programs.
We'll see the same thing with devices and personal encryption. This is only a temporary setback for the powers that be, they'll be back with another sensational, emotional case soon enough.
The current system does not represent the will of the people. It's an oligarchy supported by a security apparatus run amok.
[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/5263/civil-liberties.aspx
[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-09-28/bloomb...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
[4] http://www.gallup.com/poll/106114/six-oppose-wall-street-bai...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness
On the PATRIOT Act, the link you provided shows that 63% of Americans either want to keep the entire thing or make minor changes.
Citizens United came from the Supreme Court, an institution that is explicitly designed to be shielded from the will of the people as much as possible.
The 2000 election was a clusterfuck, but it has happened exactly once since 1888. Besides, if a few hundred votes go the other way in Florida then we wouldn't even be talking about it.
On bankers, 60% isn't overwhelming, and the government decided to go against the will of the people because they thought it was the best course of action. Most experts agree that it was the lesser of two evils.
You can go read the TPP for yourself. It's been out for three months. [1]
Americans are divided in their opinions on NSA surveillance. [2]
None of this matters though because the will of the people is not supposed to be the final say in government action. There founding fathers did not believe in direct democracy.
[1] https://ustr.gov/trade-agreements/free-trade-agreements/tran...
[2] http://www.people-press.org/2013/06/10/majority-views-nsa-ph...
> A majority of Americans is dissatisfied with the Patriot Act [1] yet it keeps getting renewed.
First, what polls say is not the same as what the electorate believes. Actual voters skew older and more conservative that the general public. Second, your poll doesn't show that Americans are dissatisfied with the Patriot Act. 63% of those polled think it requires no or only minor changes. 62% think it's about right or doesn't go far enough.
Those polls also have some very interesting statistics. 30% of those polled think that the government should take all steps necessary to prevent future terrorist attacks, even if that means violating basic civil liberties. 65% think otherwise, but 55% of those polled do not think the government's programs violate civil liberties. 55% of those polled in 2006 were okay with the Bush administration's wiretaps. 53% of those polled in 2006 thought that the Bush administration was about right or did not go far enough in restricting peoples' civil liberties to fight terrorism.
> A majority of Americans thinks political spending is corrupt [2] and that the political system is rigged, yet we get Citizens United to pour even more corporate cash into the machine.
In a 2010 poll, 68% of those polled thought the government should be able to prevent the sale of violent video games to minors: http://www.gallup.com/poll/1588/children-violence.aspx. Yet in 2011, the Supreme Court struck down a California law doing precisely that (Brown v. EMA). I think few people on HN would say that was wrongly decided. Given that the Supreme Court reviews laws that have been passed by elected legislatures, it is almost guaranteed that when it strikes down a law, it will be going against popular opinion.
> A majority of Americans voted for the Democrat in 2000, but the Republican was installed instead [3].
Frankly, I think we should not only abolish the electoral college, but the states as well. But in the meantime, who the "majority of Americans voted for" is not how we decide the election of the President.
The breadth and complexity of the issues the government has to deal with are far beyond what any one citizen could keep track of, that's why we don't have a direct democracy.
You're cherry-picking topics you (presumably) agree on.
[0] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/poll-nearly-8-in-10-americans-be...
That's a feature, not a bug.
The Electoral College was specifically designed to mitigate the power of densely populated areas.
Sometimes the will of the people prevails, and sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't, it's really disheartening; sometimes all our effort is for naught. But if we don't even try, it will always be for naught.
If there has ever been a time to illustrate that our country is an oligarchy and not a Democracy, this has been the year. There is a non-zero chance that even in our rigged, broken system that the candidates that are recognized in one or both parties will be ones that received less voter support and were chosen by the wealthy.
>We have to be prepared to fight the crypto wars forever, like unions are still fighting the labor wars a century later.
Just like the war against CISPA, which was lost to attrition.
>We could revoke the 13th and 14th Amendments and have slavery again--there is no legal impediment to that
What does the Constitution matter at all? Our system of checks and balances is beyond broken - its gone. Not to be disrespectful, but anyone who thinks that the Constitution is recognized by the government is delusional or worse. The 1st, 4th, 6th, and 9th amendments have been rendered basically moot by recent government action and court inaction. The truth is that you can't have a functioning democracy without the informed consent of the governed. When the majority of the population lacks the capacity to generate informed consent and those in power work actively to suppress that capacity you end up with the authoritarian oligarchy that we have today.
Our servants have been shown to be lying to us, and have continued lying to congress when called to task.
That's directly subverting our democracy. Treason.
Actually, I think this is the genius of the amendment system.
You are correct that it could happen. But unlike laws that can be passed or revoked by Congress by political whim, the barrier to creating or overturning Constitutional amendments is much higher and more difficult to pass.
He quite excitedly told Einstein and Morgenstern that he had found a weakness in the Constitution that would allow the US to become a dictatorship. They were horrified and tried to tell him not to bring up such ideas at the hearing, but the judge happened to note that it was a good thing that in the US, unlike Gödel's native Austria, we were not a dictatorship -- which prompted Gödel to begin explaining his discovery...[2]
Unfortunately, no one ever bothered to write down what Gödel's idea was! But it has been speculated[3] that it is this: that the Article V provision for constitutional amendments does not exclude that provision itself from amendment -- so it is possible to first pass an amendment making it easier to pass amendments, after which it could be a short trip to dictatorship under the right conditions.
Fanciful, but a fascinating story. Picturing Gödel, Einstein, and Morgenstern hanging out and being playful with each other is a treat.
[1] http://morgenstern.jeffreykegler.com
[2] https://d78508e2-a-97b1dc77-s-sites.googlegroups.com/a/jeffr...
[3] http://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=42406910501309506...
Here is the text:
> The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
So take something like the ACA individual mandate. Does that violate the 10th amendment? Well, it was held to not be a valid exercise of the commerce clause power. But it was held to be a valid exercise of the taxing power. So it cannot violate the 10th amendment, because the taxing power is one of the ones "delegated to the United States by the Constitution." Say the Supreme Court had held it wasn't valid under the taxing power either. Would it violate the 10th amendment? Technically, but the Supreme Court wouldn't invoke the 10th amendment to strike it down, because a law not supported by one of the enumerated powers is invalid anyway.
The 10th amendment, by it's very language, cannot serve as any sort of independent check. If government action passes muster under one of the enumerated powers, it is by definition "delegated to the United States by the Constitution" and cannot violate the 10th amendment. If it doesn't, it's invalid by reason of not being within the government's enumerated powers--no 10th amendment necessary.
If a well-funded superpac would systematically and indefinitely try every legal exploit to re-enact slavery you'd be grinning each attempt because "democracy"? ....
The idea that our form of government allows us the freedom to resist predatory laws is inspiring, the necessity to fight that fight... over and over again... is the best representation that true freedom is delicate.
To protect that freedom we need to hold critical thinking above all else to guard ourselves against the faux intellectualism of statements like yours.
If everyone in the US strongly valued privacy, then our government would have to behave very differently. The US government's lack of respect for personal privacy merely reflects the apathy towards the issue held by the American voting public.
I agree with the parent, that if we want progress, there is no easy path. The only long term solution is to educate the voting public as to the value of privacy. Anything else is just a band-aid.
No matter which system of government, rules (in the broadest sense) can always change. Democracy is just the attempt to better align those rules with the interests of the people (in the broadest sense).
As long as the FBI keeps within the rules they can obviously try again. And that’s got very little to do with democracy and much more with the rule of law which is really central here.
Everyone – even and especially the government – has to adhere to the law, but there are mechanisms to act within the law or to settle questions or even to change the law, all through some sort of proper and defined process. That’s just what the rule of law is.
However, within the system of rule of law (and the particular implementation of that system in the US) there are certainly ways for questions to be more or less settled. Things that are easy to change (e.g. executive orders) and things that are hard to change (e.g. constitutional amendments). There are graduations to this – and graduations that exist on purpose.
Behind that is also the realization that quickly changing things – while sometimes necessary – is not really always desirable. So there is a certain sluggishness built right into the system on purpose. And achieving constitutional amendment levels of sluggishness is actually pretty hard to overcome in the US. It’s hard to get an amendment, it’s hard to remove it. Quite on purpose. It’s for settling questions for years.
(All of this is not to say that some states don’t try to have some core values enshrined for all eternity. The German constitution has such an article that explicitly forbids amendments of two other articles. No amendment can change that Germany is a democratic and social federal state, that there are elections and three branches of government, that there is rule of law, that every German has the right to resist against anyone attempting to remove that order, that human dignity is inviolable, that human rights are the basis of any human society and that the basic rights defined in the constitution bind as law all three branches of the government. Even if you agree that there is really no way to amend this in any way – something which constitutional scholars aren’t super-decided on – there could still be a revolution of some sort that just abolishes the old constitution … things can always change, also in technically illegal ways.)
Could, but won't. Government won't ever try. People are saying - right or wrong - that they will try again to enforce backdoors.
That is certainly a valid point in the case of laws that expand a state's authority, but I don't think that is true where explicit restrictions on the state's authority are put in place (ex: bill of rights). I doubt anybody (outside of the Brady Campaign) will ever look over the bill of rights and think that we would have been better off without the explicit restrictions made clear.
> We could revoke the 13th and 14th Amendments and have slavery again--there is no legal impediment to that.
Of course there is - the constitutional amendment process is designed precisely to be an impediment. Unlike a legal proceeding, where courts can create case law essentially at a whim by legal means alone, the constitutional amendment process is a complex and different political process, requiring quite a few procedural stars to align.
One of the problems is that the courts (and, for that matter, Congress and the POTUS) tend not to abide by the text of the constitution, preferring to usurp the political process with their own legal, legislative, or bureaucratic one, respectively.
> We could abolish the EPA, or the IRS, or the NSA. We don't because these have enough supporters who value what they do, today.
I don't think this is true, but I concede that it's not really measurable. What I mean is: the reason that these methods of control persist is not that they have made a convincing case to the public that their mission is laudable and faithfully executed (environmental protection, accurate and fair taxation, and security for US persons vis a vis international dealings). In fact, it's quite plain to see that all three of these agencies have, from time to time, failed spectacularly at these missions, with some incidents attributable to incompetence and others to misconduct.
Instead, I want to suggest that the reason they persist is that they provide convenient mechanisms for exacting power and that they are controlled by people who desire that capacity.
> The 2nd Amendment remains strong today because millions of Americans work every day to keep it that way.
While I agree with this statement, I think that it is somewhat contrary to your previous one. Here you are talking about the preservation of protections offered by the text of a document, which I agree can only be protected by political vigilance. This is fundamentally different from (and perhaps the opposite of) the assertion by entrenched agencies that they operate by political will.
> So, the long-term solution for strong encryption must be a cultural one. We have to be prepared to fight the crypto wars forever, like unions are still fighting the labor wars a century later. Like civil rights activists are fighting racism even today--and will be for the foreseeable future.
Here's where I start to agree with you. This is beautifully put.
Your description sounds like Camus' interpretation of the myth of Sisyphus. I like it.
Some thing seem to be permanent. High priority lobbying goals for big corporations. (Examples: Disney & copyright extensions. Corn & corn subsidies. Car dealerships.)
Remember, at one point, there was an entire plot by businesses to basically take the entire country over, and it was highly supported by members of congress and others.
So yeah. It's gotten better, but it's still way too pervasive.
No. You can't roll back a human right. If you did it wouldn't be a valid law and people would be justified in armed resistance to it.
> We could abolish the EPA, or the IRS, or the NSA. We don't because these have enough supporters who value what they do, today.
Well, in the case of the NSA it's more because we suspect they'd commit treason and bring down the country if we tried.
(ie, pull out an old tape of Obama and frame him with something, etc.)
> Well, welcome to life in a democracy. Nothing is ever settled with finality because there are plenty of ways for future generations to change the laws we cherish today--for good or ill.
Yes, things can always be screwed up. But it should be illegal for a government worker (ie FBI) to specifically try to undermine existing decisions by, for instance, lying in court, or paying for propaganda they know to be untrue. Both things we know they do.
What if next time, a smaller player than Apple was caught in this sort of case, and they can't fight back as easily? Then it'd be easier to setup a precedent favourable to one party. This seems like a way to legally manipulate the common laws, and I think courts should put in place measures to prevent such manipulation.
Thinking further, one company could easily setup another and sue it for one thing or another. The set-up company presents a believable but purposefully flawed case and voilà: legal precedent.
I suspect that Google bought YouTube in part to avoid precisely this situation. If Viacom had won their lawsuit against YouTube, it would have endangered Google's core business: they would become liable not just for copyrighted material that they know about, but any copyrighted material on their servers, which encompasses the whole web. So they pay $1.6B for a tiny startup and a big lawsuit, and then use their full legal resources to fight (and eventually win) the lawsuit.
(There is possibly an interesting get-rich-quick hack in there: do something in a legal grey area that lots of big companies are doing too, as part of their core business, and then get sued. It is then in the big company's interest to acquire you and fight your legal battles, lest they get put out of business by an unfavorable precedent. You're playing with fire in this case, though, since if the big company doesn't come to your aid you have a multi-hundred-billion dollar lawsuit hanging over you.)
If a similar case occurs, then 3rd parties (Apple, ACLU, etc) may be able to submit amicus briefs to help the defendant. Apple might also be able to intervene and become an actual party in the case, if it can convince the court that the case's outcome will harm its interests (see Rule 24 of Federal Rules of Civil Procedure).
Witness the relentless series of attacks from SOPA, PIPA, NDAA, ACTA, CISPA, TPP, etc.
Losing only delays the inevitable because they can just play again, time after time.
Eventually they'll win one and that's all it takes, game over.
So if you made a bad decision to enter into litigation with someone, you're held to the consequences of that even after you've changed your mind? Unworkable in practice, and even in theory it's bad because you might wind up setting a precedent for someone whose case was similar to but better founded than yours.
At issue was an order, issued by a court at the government's request, that Apple was contesting.
If the order is moot or withdrawn, Apple no longer has anything to contest.
Pretty sure Apple doesn't want either of those things.
And yes, next time with a smaller player we get to see if Apple decides to be a friend of the court, or even pony up legal help for it.
But what if both parties mutually agree, but the courts don't agree? Then we get a precedent set where one side doesn't see any reason to bother to try to win. That's a horrible way to set precedent. And that's how horrible precedents get set.
The DOJ came out on top here, whether they are lying or not.
The most likely reason for dropping the case would have had nothing to do about precedent and everything to do with the fact that they couldn't proceed without lying to the court. The entire basis for the case was that the government had no other choice but to compel Apple to build "GovOS." The moment they became aware of the existence of an alternative method, they had a duty to update their brief and inform the court. And at that point, with the entire basis for their case effectively gone, they were pretty much out of options.
From the FBI's perspective, that was rather unfortunate. They probably figured this was the perfect case to pursue to try and gain the sort of precedent they wanted (an instance of Islamic terrorism on American soil? It checks all of the boxes for manipulating the public into supporting the FBI). Most likely, they never expected Apple to fight back for fear of the PR consequences of impeding a terror investigation. Minor miscalculation, that.
It was setting them up for a precedent-setting legal decision in a higher court that may very well have not gone the government's way.
>they couldn't proceed without lying to the court
You're assuming that this mysterious third party that showed up the day before the initial hearing with a method to crack the phone actually exists, and that this method was successful. That is certainly a possibility, but it is also possible that they never intended to see this through and hoped that they could intimidate Apple into doing exactly what they wanted.
“Our decision to conclude the litigation was based solely on the fact that, with the recent assistance of a third party, we are now able to unlock that iPhone without compromising any information on the phone,” Eileen Decker, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, said in a statement.
at least curious. Googling "no data was compromised" gives me only links that use that in the meaning "third parties did not get access to the data".
So, if that really is what Eileen Decker said, what exactly did she mean?
Unless one of their real goals was to get the conversation going about creating new laws that would make uncrackable products illegal, without actually testing the limits of existing laws. Because that is what they achieved.
> This particular phone is immaterial, and Apple can always talk big later about how they patched any of the security holes that the government used, to recover face.
That is a nuanced understanding of this issue that most consumers simply do not and will not have. Most will hear nothing other than "the feds can now crack iPhones" and will assume that government will be able to beat any future improvements too.
There seems to be much more to this beyond the actual capabilty and it doesn't seem the spin 'apple fighting for our rights' which mainstream media loves is the most likely, so I wpuldn't say FBI hasn't accomplished its goal - especially if it was to cast doubt on Apple security, as they're now basically advertised they can do it no matter what. Unless FBI agreed to previous apple request and they did it togheter under cover.
And? What makes you think most consumers will care that the government cracked an iPhone?
FBI director Comey's "Going Dark" narrative no longer holds water with anyone who's paying attention. He cried wolf so loud he's been heard on every continent. If and when he tries this again, he'll get a ton more blowback.
Similarly, Obama's jibes about security "absolutism" now appear ridiculous. As are his criticism of impenetrable black boxes protecting child molesters. What he really wants is for the Emmental-like extensions of our brains to have even more holes. That's an obviously un-winnable argument.
Also, the bar for proving you've tried all possible alternatives for gaining access just got a lot higher in applying the All Writs Act. It took three months plus a month of major international news stories specifically about this court case to gain entry — something that might really be impossible to achieve next time. But now everyone knows when they swore under oath many times in multiple public venues that they couldn't gain access, what they really meant was "not yet" and not "it's impossible".
Finally, Apple should now be motivated to remove themselves as the weak link in their security ecosystem. System updates shouldn't be possible without first wiping the information needed to derive the encryption key or first supplying that key. I can also dream about them open sourcing their code to allow security researchers to bug hunt (an impossible dream). And maybe they'll change their minds on bug bounties. Whatever happens, it's now beyond doubt that foreign entities are exploiting vulnerabilities in the iPhone and we all expect Apple to beef up their security accordingly — regardless of how this may hinder law enforcement.
You might also say they dropped it because going to court and losing would greatly narrow the scope of the All Writs act. Then the "maybe illegal" spying coersion becomes "actually illegal"
Farook and wife smashed their personal phones yet left his work iphone untouched.
Investigators seized Farook’s work iPhone from a black Lexus IS300 parked
outside his residence in Redlands, which authorities obtained a warrant to
search, and two personal mobile phones were found smashed and discarded in a
dumpster behind the residence, court records show.
Now, the FBI has just announced to the world that any information locked up in the San Bernardino iPhone is now in their hands. Presumably any co-conspirators who thought their contact details might be in that phone are now aware of that.
Now, on the other hand, for the past month or so, the FBI has on the contrary been doing a very good job of informing the world, with to some extent Apple's help, that they did not have access to the information in that phone. That may have served to reassure those same conspirators that the FBI was not onto them.. When perhaps they had actually cracked the phone some time ago, and were in fact in the process of employing that intelligence.
Too charitable to suspect the FBI of having pulled that off?
Apple should be able to recover their legal costs.
FWIW, I agree that privacy is ignored and should be respected, but apple chose this fight. I'm glad they did, but they knew it would cost them.
If the DoJ ultimately won the case, then it's fair that Apple should have to pay their legal costs.
But since using a 200 year old law to force Apple to do work they don't want to do was a legal stretch, if the DoJ lost the case then again I'd say the DoJ should pay Apple's legal costs.
IIRC, but wasn't the order issued with only one side present at court (i.e. without Apple's attorneys being present to raise issues before it was issued)?
Businesses don't often pay employees to do nothing, that legal team would be doing other corporate legal work if they weren't working on this case, and I'm sure they paid outside consultants to help with the case.
The next bet is whether they find anything relevant? My bet is no. Next bet after that is whether they admit it? My bet is they won't.
But the more important one is if they tell Apple or open a CVE for the exploit they used if it's not a flash and guess technique they used? Is it ethical for FBI to sit on an exploit?
Sounds reasonable. No trivial task I bet, but with the world's attention on the case a lot of kids would be having a crack at the trendiest break-in job going right now.
The guys who cracked the iPhone probably earned the equivalent of signing a record label deal. At the very least, the FBI liked and subscribed.
I'd wager that this will no longer be true in the iPhone 7.
I think this is a great outcome.
"The Justice Department said Monday it has accessed data on the iPhone used by a shooter in last year's San Bernardino, California, attacks and no longer needs Apple's help in cracking it."
Apparently a 3rd party from Israel (http://www.cellebrite.com/) helped the FBI which begs the question, how did they do it? Do they have universal access to all iOS devices or just this particular device? This really makes me start to think there is a backdoor.
It seems like there are at least certain iphones that can be opened using this method and similar hardware based approaches. Are the feds going to move forward with that? It seems like accessing this particular phone wasn't trivial or cheap. So I'd imagine that it will come down to whether or not it's "worth" the cost of flashing individual chips for each of the other devices.
And what happens if there is potentially exonerating evidence on one of those phones? Does the defense team have to come up with the money to pay for a lab or outside company to open the phone? And also, is an encrypted phone going to be the new 'dna evidence'? Like, will a brand new iphone that's linked to a major crime be held away for years until the security community can hack it, potentially setting people free or sending them to jail?
Sorry for all the interrogatives. Even though this particular case has been settled, there are still a lot of questions surrounding default device level encryption.
Even though the feds found an exploit that allows 'em to decrypt the current iOS, Apple's response is undoubtedly gonna be much-improved security in the next version.
So in a few years when the feds demand that an iOS 10.x device be decrypted, this whole pageant will start over again.
Yes, but who knows when they'll ever get this good a case again?
They chose this case and not any of the dozens of similar investigations mentioned in articles that have come out since.
It's a disgrace to the victims, their families and friends.
It's also a disgrace to the public, trying to scare us into complacency.
I think this whole thing is every bit as much a trial balloon to see how the public accepts the various arguments. And I think that's still unclear. The polls suggest a scant majority supported the FBI, but not enough to get Congress to change the law make it clear companies can be rolled over by the government.
That means there will be a next time.
"The government has now successfully accessed the data stored on Farook's iPhone and therefore no longer requires the assistance from Apple Inc. mandated by Court's Order Compelling Apple Inc. to Assist Agents in Search dated February 16, 2016."
The government also gets to use the same logic regarding the power of the court to compel at some time in the future, when this assuredly comes up again.
I just wonder what methods they used, I think it'd be pretty interesting to learn just the general strategy, as I assume they would never tell how exactly they did it.
What's good about the case is that it brought forth a discussion about privacy. This case coupled with the Clinton email scandal should move a few ideas forward developing solutions that wouldn't otherwise have been profitable ventures. Where Lavabit had a very niche market a few years ago, companies thinking along those lines will have success moving forward.
Regardless of the legal requirement, others (and likely Crocker) don't think that this is that likely to happen, though.
Which broader Right is this specific activity a representation of?
What does the act of fabricating a secret keeper mean, and does a company gain rights, or are the rights of some set of individuals collectively conferred upon the company by default?
Would making a different object, such as a gun, alter said rights? Pretty sure the constitution says Apple can proceed without interference, but these are questions worth contemplating.
Particularly, how isn't this some violation of section a2 ("intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access," the same thing that got Aaron Swartz indicted)? Is it basically, since the feds had a warrant, they can do whatever they want? (And if they don't have a warrant, is it still legal?)
But in this case, Farook is dead. He never owned the phone. The organization that did own the phone wants the FBI to crack it, for easily understandable reasons. On ownership, at least, the facts are unusually friendly to the FBI.
There are really a few sub-questions: Is it legal, and are the results admissible as evidence?
Whether or not it's legal depends on the circumstances. There are many cases in which the police can search something, e.g., if they believe it's critical to prevent an immediate threat. Whether or not it's admissible is more thorny, and something that's still being fought out in the courts. (google: warrantless cell phone search admissible)
From here, what's stopping the FBI from claiming they found X, Y, and Z on the phone, and further claiming they were all important pieces of evidence, that could possibly have prevented the attack, etc., etc., when they really didn't? Then, use that to bolster their arguments against encryption and privacy?
What means will keep them honest about what they did or did not find?
So true .. and it up to you to continue our peoples struggle. - I've seen this time and time again .. WTC7 was one of those don't believe your eyes. and Now the Gov. lackeys need your info to sell as so-called information brokers to get you special offers. Based on any and all of your actions. ( think supper cookies ) but moved to a mobile platform you! And you if don't want special offers - then you are a terrorist! - and YOU become the focus. Not WTC7 - Waco or that poor man in the US house who forgot he was 2nd admin C&C denied. But did not get a chance to explain - before the cover up started. I support APPLE & Mr. Snowden vs. the FBI/INFORMATION BROKERS on this hope you do as well.
Then again, why can't Apple sue Cellebrite under the DMCA for bypassing their security?
Wouldn't that be perjury?
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2778264-Apple-Status...
Unless they're in on it too, of course.
"There are 6 other cases where Apple is still fighting the DOJ re: unlocking phones"
https://twitter.com/matthewkeyslive/status/71458323211775590...
^ Link includes an image with 7 other cases where Apple has either objected to warrants, 2 that are still in process.
The most interesting one is the last, which involves an iPhone 6+ running iOS 9.1. It's not yet clear whether the zero day that allowed the government to access the San Bernardino phone also works on the iPhone 6, which has a secure enclave (unlike the San Bernardino phone). There are some other iPhone 6 and iPhone 5S devices in the list too running older versions of iOS.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/28/news/companies/fbi-apple-iph...
Meanwhile Joe Public comes away with the idea Apple==SafeEncryption.
If this were some new encrypted messaging service we'd all be ripping the shit out of it just on this basis.
Apparently there is a law (enacted under the Obama) requiring the disclosure of the cracking technique, at least to the manufacturer, precisely to facilitate improvements in security.
Surely that should be latest hardware upgrades. The latest software upgrades are no good if not backed up by the secure enclave.
Probably copied phone's memory and implemented a way to restore the state of the phone, then brute force try passcodes? I guess that could take only a week if they had only a 4 digit passcode.
Meh
This has an additional benefit: rather than having the "boundaries" here be defined by a ruling, now in theory they have more time to work in a "gray area".
My take is that HN crowd is completely unrepresentative vis-a-vis the opinion of majority on this issue.
The tech that FBI is claiming to have cracked is the iPhone 5C which does not have the Secure Enclave hardware that all later iPhones do and which are far more of an actual challenge to crack.
But it also requires knowing how they did it. I think most likely they copied the flash, started iterating passcodes, and then reflashed the phone everytime they ran out of attempts. That's sufficiently obvious (to me anyway) that it's not much of an exploit worth documenting and also there's no software fix for such a thing. You'd need to put the passcode attempt counter on some separate piece of hardware that either can't be externally read or reflashed.
But I suspect if Apple attempted this, the FBI would just say they're not allowed to sue.