> > The only way to guarantee that such a powerful tool isn’t abused and doesn’t fall into the wrong hands is to never create it.
And of course, that's also wrong. The only way to guarantee that such a powerful tool isn't abused it and doesn't fall into the wrong hands is to make it impossible for such a tool to exist, not to refuse to create it.
Right now, today, Apple has the ability to create such a tool. Some finite number of human beings at Apple have the ability to create such a tool on their own initiative, e.g. were they disgruntled.
It should be impossible for Apple, or disgruntled Apple employees, or any nation state, to create such a tool.
Otherwise, it will eventually be created, because if something is possible then is eventually probable.
If a court can force a company to create new technology that didn't exist before, what other tools might they be forced to build?
1) Stream keystrokes, audio, video, location to law enforcement prior to encryption
2) Replace actual search results with government-approved results
3) Force Apple to create target lists of suspects based on their location, apps installed, sites visited, keywords typed
Bad things happen when the government can force private companies and individuals to create new tools for law enforcement.
There is no technology that prevents Apple from subverting Apple's security. If Apple loses, the new precedent could open Pandora's box.
That's just in this universe. If users truly owned their devices, with full knowledge of the hardware and control of the software + data, we would never have this discussion.
In this world, you have to jump through flaming hoops just to prevent Apple from automatically swapping out your OS!
Then we're getting into compromised hardware, you verified that the chips actually are the same as the circuit diagrams after all.
There is only so much tinfoil you can deploy. If an advanced nation state truly has you in its sights there isn't much you can do about it, and to be honest that's the way it should be. We sacrifice individual liberties for the advantages of being part of an organised society, and the limitation of coercive power to the state is a key part of that.
A well regulated state in which the right people get targeted, with an acceptably low false positive rate that scales based on the degree of privacy violation of the targeting seems to be a perfectly sensible state of affairs. Apple's argument that they are being asked to do something that isn't justified fits just fine into that.
* Certificate Transparency-style public ledger for all firmwares that Apple has signed. Refuse an update if the firmware version has not been published to the ledger. This would make these backdooring attempts public, since we can assume people would watch the ledger and ask questions in case of an unknown version being published.
* For open source firmwares, reproducible builds are a great tool to make sure the distributed binaries actually match the publicly reviewable source code. Third parties could recompile the firmware and attest (through signing) that they get the same result.
I don't know any implementation of either of these two systems, at least publicly available (hint: Bazel does reproducible builds, and you can guess what is driving this requierment). Debian and Mozilla are experimenting with reproducible builds but I don't know that it ever reached any useful conclusion.
That's seems like a fantastic idea but without open source firmware I don't see how it could be enforced.
But it's pretty easy to imagine a feature where, similar to cert-pinning, many clients report the hashes that they see on the website and if you see something different from what everyone else does, you know something is wrong. It wouldn't need to be a "techie" feature - it would simply show a package as broken and refuse to install if it wasn't verifying, etc.
And the goal isn't some impossible 100% security, the goal is enough security to end mass interception and make the government rely on warrants and targeted tactics again.
This is why as well as serving those hashes over HTTPS, you sign the hashes with a key, the public part of which is distributed/retrievable/verifiable via some other means.
I think there's value in the purely user-based solution though. If two people go to a site at the same time and aren't served the same binary they should be curious why, even if the company securely and auditably signed both images.
And, it helps in all the cases when companies don't implement great release-security.
And how do I verify that the code I've just read is what shipped on my computer? If I install it myself, how do I verify the CD or ISO I have is what I read? If I compiled it myself, how do I verify the compiler didn't change anything? What about the system that compiled the code, do I trust that? How far back do I have to go before I have trusted everything?
And then what about hardware? Is there a chip that changes some of the code that's running? Can I verify every piece of hardware in my system, a 16-core CPU with 64GB of RAM and a high-end video card? How do I even do that? And what are the odds I am a world class C coder and a world-class hardware expert?
And then what about client code? Am I a world-class Javascript expert too, with full source access to the Django backend? And the system that is running that server code, do I have access to that hardware to make sure it's not going to compromise my security?
No. Fully trusting a computer is impossible. It doesn't mean we shouldn't try, we should at least make it as hard as possible for the bad guys to trick us. But what's better, IMO, is to create an environment where it's detrimental to companies to trick their users like that. Apple seems to have gotten a lot of great press for standing up in this situation. There's a market for it.
Can you trust Apple tech? Maybe not. But can you trust it more than Google or Microsoft or Samsung or Facebook or Amazon etc etc? It does seem that way. Without being a world-class expert in everything, eventually you have to trust someone.
I completely agree. I liken it to something like world-peace: It's an ideal, and we'll probably never get there. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to get there though.
We should have a series of standardized trusted execution modules which are open source hardware and open source software. There should be a public process by which these are vetted. Watchdog groups could disassemble samples of the chips and place them under electron microscopes and otherwise examine them for tampering.
The effect of this would be to place individuals and grassroots organizations on an even playing field with corporations and governments with regards to such tools. It's a disaster for large organizations to have access to individual private information, yet it's a societal boon for such organizations to be open and for individuals to know what they are doing. The same asymmetry applies to trusted execution. It's a disaster when big organizations use it against individuals, but it would be a societal good if individuals could revoke access to their information from corporations when they break goodwill.
It's just the old versions, before Apple started making privacy a political tentpole, that they could ever manage to backdoor in this particular way. That's still bad—but what Apple are mainly worrying about is that this precedent would force them to aid the FBI in other act-of-creation ways, not just in ways involving introducing backdoors.
The FBI might compel Apple to, for example, build a monitoring and clustering service into iTunes Genius/Apple Music to de-anonymize people through their music preferences; or they might request Apple build a facility to censor all messages travelling through APNS that mention the names of informants in active sting operations. Or they might compel Apple to build a secret CPU ring-0 elevation handshake into the A10 chip.
Even if the new generation of iOS devices was completely un-backdoor-able, and the usage of the old generation was effectively nil, that still wouldn't minimize the FBI's request. The FBI are likely much more concerned about all the orders they could give to, effectively, turn Apple's engineering talent into a domestic-surveillance consultancy.
The problem for Apple, or any other tech company, is that once you say "okay" once, you can't swat away the next one by saying "Impossible" and being done with it. You have to lawyer up. That takes time and costs money.
So Apple's real issue is that they don't want to spend many millions of dollars (billions?) on lawyers to get the FBI and other alphabet agencies to behave properly. That's a very legitimate business position. It's just a little more nuanced than what we were told on day one.
For example, the government could require Apple to build future iPhone software to permit backdoor access. The question today is whether the government can do so with a court-issued warrant, or whether it will require legislation, as it did with CALEA.
Apple can hopefully win this case based on the forced creation aspect. But they'd likely lose the next iteration where the FBI subpoenas technical documentation about the key derivation function, and builds their own hardware to talk to the hardened chip. Of course the FBI has little interest in doing this, because the whole affair is a psyop.
If you want to fully protect your customers, don't design backdoors into your products in the first place!
And Apple has done that: the type of hack the FBI is asking for cannot work on newer iPhones.
Do you have the source for that, too? I was still under the impression that the Secure Enclave would erase the keys if it's updated.
It's a pretty huge flaw if the firmware can be updated and the keys preserved without first validating with the passcode.
I also don't understand why they couldn't provide the FBI with an OS that refuses to run on anything other than the specific device in question. Isn't that the whole point of code signing?
Tim Cook today doesn't create it. Cook Tim tomorrow will.
If you think (and it's not crazy) that sometimes small, elite populations know better than the public at large, great, but please don't call that democracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy
This is what we mean when we use the word "democracy" today, unless you live in ancient Greece or some small village.
So having experts on technology,security and privacy being overruled by an uneducated mob is madness, not democracy.
If you're doing something that will attract negative political attention, mail a letter.
Even that might not help:
http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/10/how-soviets-used-ibm...
It's pretty trivial to obscure that metadata, and frankly the content of your correspondence is more important than the metadata.
Your mail has fairly robust legal protection, and you can spend more money (i.e. Registered mail) to provide a higher level of tamper evidence and accountability in transit.
Is that true? I mean, wouldn't those employees need the root signing certificate... something I suspect is very tightly protected even within apple.
By, say, breaking up its custodianship among a … finite group of human beings.
But that said I'm definitely for the stance that technology be designed in such a way to be unbreakable to Apple or anyone else once the device is sold.
Can it force you to buy goods and services? Sure, health care! Can it prosecute pre-crimes? Yep, drunk driving! Capture and log all human communications without a warrant for unspecified future uses? Yes, Prism. Get into the religion business? Why not? Marry people! Then there's using taxing authority as a weapon against political opponents (Tea Party thing.) And, taking land and property from citizens for profit (Kelo decision.) Control/erode the value of currency. Endless, shameless pork for political friends, bundlers, and donors. And on and on and on.
I won't be surprised when the US government compels Apple to sign a hacked copy of iOS. When Apple Computer is your last line of defense against tyranny, guess what, you're already screwed!
Actually, you got that one round the wrong way. Governments have been in the marriage business before religion was. (Early Christians were married under Roman civil law and did not observe marriage as a sacrament.)
You get liquored up beyond the set legal limit, you get in your car, put the key in the ignition, and start the engine. Is that a crime, or is it a pre-crime?
Next experiment. Same as above, but you put it into gear and keep your foot on the brakes. Is that a crime, or a pre-crime?
Last experiment. Same as above, but you take your foot off the break and drive home without incident, observing traffic signs and not harming anyone or their property. Is that a crime, or a pre-crime?
If you answered "it's all crimes because you can't drive drunk because there's laws" then you've accepted prosecuting made-up pre-crimes.
In my opinion, you have to actually do some damage to be a criminal. _Then_ you throw the book at 'em, no mercy.
Its a crime, generally, as soon as you are driving on a public road at above the legal limit.
(And, incidentally, its "brake". "Break" is a word, but not the word you are looking for.)
> If you answered "it's all crimes because you can't drive drunk because there's laws" then you've accepted prosecuting made-up pre-crimes.
All crimes are "made-up", but its not a pre-crime (which is a prediction of a future violation of a criminal law), but an actual defined prohibited act.
> In my opinion, you have to actually do some damage to be a criminal.
You are entitled to your opinion of what should and should not be a crime, but it probably doesn't help discussing those to redefine the word "crime" to mean "thing that EdSharkey thinks should be a crime" and "pre-crime" to mean "actual violation of criminal law that EdSharkey doesn't think should be a crime".
In any case, we're on a slippery slope conditioning the masses for control. I marvel at it. I wonder what's next, jail time for prohibited speech and later prohibited thoughts?
> You are entitled to your opinion of what should and should not be a crime, but it probably doesn't help discussing those to redefine the word "crime" to mean "thing that EdSharkey thinks should be a crime" and "pre-crime" to mean "actual violation of criminal law that EdSharkey doesn't think should be a crime".
Am I really entitled to my opinion, though? It sounds like I probably shouldn't be entitled to an opinion due to my dangerous ideas.
(BTW, you had a run-on sentence there. You probably want to break that up so that others don't nitpick you parenthetically, but I took your meaning. I want you to know that I empathize and figure you were probably writing that on-the-go and didn't have a chance to fully wordsmith it. I don't think lesser of you even when what you write has flaws.)
Stepping away from my devil's advocate role for this thread for a bit ... IRL I have kids too, and I struggle with freedom issues like this. I have had crackups with distracted drivers that messing with cellphone, kids, and eating/smoking behind the wheel that I suspect are way more dangerous than your average drunk that can hold his drink and regularly drives. I was rear-ended on the freeway going freeway speed (not braking) by a guy screwing around on his cellphone. (Gasp, I used 'braking' not 'breaking'! English is hard! ;)
What can you do? Life is so dangerous. How much freedom do you surrender before you feel secure?? Fear drives people into oppression.
I've described what is a crime, not what should be a crime.
> In any case, we're on a slippery slope conditioning the masses for control.
Maybe, but essentially regulatory, preventive offenses like drunk driving aren't new, so its hard to describe a "slippery slope" based on their existence. I mean, that type of offense has been around in the systems from which the US systems descend longer than the US itself has been around; if its a slippery slope, where is the slipping?
> I wonder what's next, jail time for prohibited speech and later prohibited thoughts?
While there has been some mixed results, I think the long-term trend in the time that regulatory, preventive, offenses have been around has been toward greater protection for speech and conscience, not less. So I don't see those things as likely to be what's next -- though, certainly, they do get proposed from time to time, and have even been enforced. (The use of the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act during the Red Scare, for instance.)
> Am I really entitled to my opinion, though?
Yes.
> It sounds like I probably shouldn't be entitled to an opinion due to my dangerous ideas.
"Sounds like" based on...what actual thing that's been argued in this thread?
> (BTW, you had a run-on sentence there. You probably want to break that up so that others don't nitpick you parenthetically [...])
I don't mind parenthetical corrections, but I think if you go and diagram that sentence out you'll realize that its just long, not a run-on.
I wasn't mechanistic in my thinking though, you know what I'm saying? I was making a point, did you grok it?
Not a crime.
> you put it into gear and keep your foot on the brakes.
A crime.
In the first case you are not driving. In the second case you absolutely, unambiguously are driving.
It's not a crime because you might kill someone, it's a crime because it has been defined as such in legislation. The legislation exists because you might kill someone.
Law is arbitrary because it has to be. And we have picked this arbitrary line because society broadly agrees that this line makes the most sense.
> In my opinion, you have to actually do some damage to be a criminal.
Then I'm very glad you don't have control over the law. I don't want drunk people to drive because I drive on the road, my family drives and travels on the road, my friends drive and travel on the road.
Afaik most jurisdictions would consider that "in control" of the motor vehicle and thus operating it under the influence of alcohol, and thus a crime.
In Australia I don't think the engine even has to be running, I think keys in the ignition are enough to show "control" and thus charge you.
If you want to sleep it off, make sure you're in the passenger seat.
A) A man walks in the street carrying a shotgun visibly
B) A man walks in the street waving around his shotgun
C) A group of men walk in the street waving around their shotguns and various rifles
D) A man points an unloaded gun at another man (a total stranger) in the street in broad day light.
I would argue all these are crimes because you are terrorizing people, even if you never injured anyone nor had the intention of injuring anyone.
What decent gun owner would walk around "waving his shotgun"? That sounds crazy, who would do that? Gun owners are people. Like, normal good people - neighbors I would probably trust. Does your view of gun owners differ?
There was no mention of the decency or otherwise of the hypothetical people, and it didn't read like they where intended as a moral illustration of gun owners in general. Sounds like you have a defensive agenda.
>..menacing behavior like that would be disturbing the peace or terrorism as you say.
So we can observe that some of the hypothetical people, who may or may not be gun owners, who may just be gun borrowers, are probably not, in this case, decent and probably are intending to menace.
The thought experiment was meant to counter the arguments in the parent comment about whether drunk-driving is a crime or merely a "pre-crime".
The question is whether a court-issued warrant is sufficient to do so, or whether that power is only available via the Congress.
Can you elaborate on this one? I can't figure out what it's referencing.
Here's a little bit from it:
> In 2013, the IRS became embroiled in a political scandal in which it was discovered that the agency subjected conservative or conservative-sounding groups filing for tax-exempt status to extra scrutiny.[56]
> On September 5, 16 months after the scandal first erupted, a Senate Subcommittee released a report that confirmed that Internal Revenue Service used inappropriate criteria to target Tea Party groups, but found no evidence of political bias.[57] The chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations confirmed that while the actions were "inappropriate, intrusive, and burdensome," the Democrats have often experienced similar treatment.[58] Republicans noted that 83% of the groups being held up by the IRS were right-leaning; and the Subcommittee Minority staff, which did not join the Majority staff report, filed a dissenting report entitled, “IRS Targeting Tea Party Groups.” [59]
The shenanigans happened in the run-up to the 2012 elections. The "extra scrutiny" was basically stonewalling, delays, and creepy investigations into personal lives of individuals in the groups that were filing for tax-exempt status. If I recall correctly, when you had "Tea" or "Patriot" in the name of your organization, your application automatically got forwarded to a dedicated abuse squad at IRS. Tea parties had trouble organizing due to these tactics because they couldn't fundraise.
This is the most interesting part of the question here. They aren't forcing Apple to give up something they have, or divulge information they already know. They're basically commandeering the services a private company for the purpose of the state. It makes me wonder where it would end - could the judge - judging it useful to help a court case, just pull a citizen off the street and tell them to go and get him / her a coffee? Is there any limit to what they can ask a private citizen to do, once they decide it is in some way useful for solving a crime? Could they even demand someone commit a crime and then prosecute them for the crime?
You know, all this discussion has reminded me of the fact that what we know as "corporations" today descend from the historical concept of "charter companies"—literally, corporations the government brings into being to serve the public good through private enterprise (in modern terms, to increase GDP), with an expected finite lifetime.
The "charter" of such companies was both a little law that individually granted the company a set of group rights, but also a statement of purpose and boundaries: both an enumeration of what the company should pursue (e.g. profit through importation of trapped furs), and what it shouldn't (e.g. profit through actually trapping those furs oneself; profit through trade of sugar-cane; a monopoly; colonial expansion; lobbying...)
It seems to me that the crux of the issue, here, is that we think that somehow the American corporation is no longer a thing that is brought into being by the state to serve the public good, but rather something private individuals have the right to bring into being for their own purposes, with the state having no say except insofar as to make certain corporate practices illegal.
In other words, we now do think of corporations as people—or more specifically, like the children of people. As with children, everyone seems to think they have the right, with no government interference, to create a corporation; everyone seems to think they have the right to guide and "raise" their own corporation however they wish; everyone seems to think it's perfectly okay if their corporation does things that benefit it at the expense of the state, as long as none of those things are explicitly declared illegal; etc.
In the historical model, none of this was true; corporations were the "children" of the state itself, raised to pursue its goals—with the CEO and directors taking a stewardship role, guessing what the state would prefer and executing on that. If they were ever wrong, they'd be punished—historically, by simply having the corporation disbanded at the whim of the king. (Also, probably, the board of directors would be punished as individuals; chartered companies had no concept of limited liability.)
Chartered companies still sort of exist:
• Many countries have "crown corporations"—like chartered companies, these are brought into existence and given a mission by the government—but they effectively have the government sitting directly on their board with voting rights, and often their cashflow happens through the state treasury. (And other modern corporations, although not explicitly set up this way, can be thought of as effectively crown corporations—China's airlines, for example, are explicitly owned by the Chinese government as majority shareholders, although in theory those shares could be sold.)
• More interestingly, in some countries (e.g. Britain, India, Canada) there are municipal corporations: cities, townships, etc. are brought into being using exactly the same sort of "charter" as historical charter companies, and run with exactly the same goal: to further the interests of the state that created them, with the municipal "government" (actually a CEO and board of directors—"mayor" is just a cute title that is meaningless to the law) acting in a stewardship capacity.
---
To get to the point: if the California State Legislature wanted to (at the behest of the FBI), they could just change Apple Inc.'s charter to make "doing everything possible to aid FBI investigations into data held on, or passed through, Apple-produced devices" an overriding concern above corporate profit.
Charters are a thing given by the state to the individual, just like, say, copyrights are. Like copyrights, they are brought into being to further the public good. The benefit to the private individuals holding a corporate charter (like the benefit of having a copyright) is a cost the state has decided is worth paying, to get the resultant benefit to the public good. But the state gets the final say: it can revoke or modify whatever it likes if it doesn't think the public good is being served.
People have inalienable rights, because people existed before governments did. Corporations don't, because corporations exist as a contract between people-taken-as-a-group (i.e. the state) and people-taken-as-individuals.
This is a good and a bad thing: it means that precepts like "corporations exist to pursue profit at all costs" are not actually "hardcoded" into the laws of the universe, but are just part of the particular way the state has chosen to make corporations work. If we (people-taken-as-whole) stopped thinking that that was a good idea, we could just change the corporate "goal conditions"—and the world would suddenly be different.
Are search warrants oppressive? Can you distinguish this request from the FBI requesting a safe manufacturer modify the firmware on a single safe?
I doubt either of these can be reliably argued.
It's not "going dark" that is an unprecedented change, it was the brief "going light" period that preceded it. Law enforcement has apparently lost the ability to do on the ground investigation work in favor of whiz bang-ery (and intelligence has lost the ability to do humint). Well, whiz bang-ery is a two way street. Now is the time to revive those old skills and deal with a _return_ to a world where you can't just outsource your job to a wire tap.
Phone call, texts, or data logs? Subpoena the cell company or the ISP.
Email? Subpoena the hosting provider.
Any communications used on that phone traveled over the Internet, and the logs are most likely preserved. They could get all of the logs of outgoing requests from the cell company and then go to each service provider and demand dumps of data from any accounts that Phone logged into right?
Surely they have enough evidence to convict the accused. The phone likely wouldn't give them anything essential to the case. It's already a wrap.
However, the legal precedent would be invaluable for future <s>rights violations</s>legal proceedings. They have 1. Nothing to lose in this particular case. 2. A maximally effective situation for getting this ruling, complete with irrational fear-based public support ("bcuz turrists!1!").
Seriously. If your goal is to create this legal precedent, go ahead and try to imagine a better scenario under which this could rule in your favor. I'll wait.
The only iPhone the FBI have is the work phone, which he might not have used to contact terrorists with it. If he did he'd destroy it as well.
The problem is that judges and politicians are not tech savvy enough to understand why they shouldn't force Apple to make a tool to break passcodes on iPhones. How that makes any iPhone insecure in the wrong hands.
The primary service provider being Apple, who operates a fully encrypted messaging system where the cleartext only ever exists on the device.
It's a child abuser's wet dream.
Chances are, this happened at least once over the lifetime of the terrorists ownership of the phone - thus we can at least see who they are communicating with, right?
Wouldn't that be a good starting point?
And call records - they must have called someone - if only to talk about the weather.
Is that really acceptable to you? Maybe they accidentally screwed up once so it's OK to keep the private affairs of a dead terrorist secret for no good reason?
> Wouldn't that be a good starting point?
I would have thought the best starting point was unlocking the phone, given the owner is dead and committed horrific crimes.
But not the service provider intentionally denying access to this vital information? What a bizarre twist of logic!
A search warrant doesn't require me to create a new capability that did not exist before.
From the FAQ:
The digital world is very different from the physical world. In
the physical world you can destroy something and it’s gone.
But in the digital world, the technique, once created, could
be used over and over again, on any number of devices...
The only way to guarantee that such a powerful tool isn’t abused
and doesn’t fall into the wrong hands is to never create it.It might, depending on the analytical outcome of the three-factor test introduced in the _New York Telephone_ case. (This case was decided before compelled pen register assistance was prescribed by Congressional legislation.)
The case itself is illustrative and enlightening: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/434/159/case.htm...
"The power conferred by the [All Writs] Act extends, under appropriate circumstances, to persons who, though not parties to the original action or engaged in wrongdoing, are in a position to frustrate the implementation of a court order or the proper administration of justice..."
The factors are:
(1) whether the third party is "so far removed as a third party from the underlying controversy that its assistance could not permissibly be compelled by the order of the court"
(2) Whether the burden placed on the third party is "unreasonable"
(3) Whether the assistance is "essential to the fulfillment of the purpose" of the warrant
It's unfortunate that Hacker News isn't commented upon by more attorneys, and that most news articles don't link directly to the legal filings in these cases; much confusion and false assumptions about the law could be clarified.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
A potentially important factor is that the phone companies used pen registers themselves all the time, whereas Apple has no desire at all to write the software that the FBI wants.
It's worth noting that despite the outcome of that case, Congress still had to pass CALEA, which seems to imply there are limits to what can be compelled under All Writs.
However, you actually have to get to the courts before the All Writs Act can be applied.
CALEA was passed to create a preemptive requirement for standardized wiretap interfaces/equipment, processes, etc, prior to any actual judicial warrant or writ being written.
The fourth amendment grants us protection against "unreasonable" search and seizure, but doesn't grant the government an affirmative right to require that future "reasonable" searches be easy, or possible.
It also (unfortunately, in my view) doesn't prevent the government from requiring preemptive action to support future searches, and that's what CALEA does.
The reason I say that, is that now that it has been proven the phone does not permit access, the FBI is trying to use a warrant to force Apple to break into the phone. But if providing access was never a legal requirement in the first place, why is it Apple's problem now?
Yes, only Apple can do what the FBI wants to do. In my mind, that should not be sufficient, in the absense of a legislative requirement, to force Apple to break a software system against their will--even their own software system.
I mean, let's say the FBI wants to run a sting operation against a gangster. Can a court use All Writs to force some random person to participate in the sting? I would think not.
Let's say law enforcement needs to pull a hard drive from a 30th floor apartment, without alerting the doorman. Can a court use All Writs to force a rock climber to climb up the building and go in the window to get it? Again, I would think not. Even if there was only one rock climber in the entire U.S. who could do what the FBI needed, it doesn't seem likely to me that an All Writs warrant would succeed against that person.
So why should it succeed against Apple? I mean, Apple is the only company that can do what the FBI wants--true. And they did build the phone to prevent access. But there was no requirement to build it any other way, so why would that be relevant?
If they didn't have it, they couldn't be required to use it.
Apple has many capabilities--they're a $500 billion dollar technology company. Which capabilities are not available to the FBI via an All Writs warrant?
I'll quote the DoJ's legal brief on how Apple is not "far removed" from this phone owned by a 3rd party:
"... the government is seeking to use capabilities that Apple has purposefully retained in a situation where the former user of the phone is dead ..."
"... iPhones will only run software cryptographically signed by Apple ... Just because Apple has sold the phone to a customer and that customer has created a passcode does not mean that the close software connection ceases to exist; Apple has designed the phone and software updates so that Apple's continued involvement and connection is required."
"More generally, the burden associated with compliance with legal process is measured based on the direct costs of compliance, not on other more general considerations about reputations or the ramifications of compliance".
That does not in any way explain why Apple should be compelled to write new software, that they would not otherwise choose to write, before pushing it as an update.
Apple retained the ability to push updates to improve the performance and security of products, not to make it easier to hack them. There is a difference!
Nobody else can.
That's a big difference.
ISTM the right outcome is for Congress to weigh in with specific legislation that can supersede AWA in cases like this.
And calling it "creating new technology" (not your words, but others'), is silly too. Doing almost anything with software is creating new software, but calling it new technology makes it sound like they have to go out and do a bunch of R&D and make some significant breakthroughs or something. In reality, it's a trivial thing.
To address the quote you posted, it sounds like Apple is probably lying there too. Especially given the vast exaggerations in other parts. I highly doubt they would have a hard time making a modified OS that was device locked.
But if it's really true that they can't make a device locked firmware, well, then of course I hope they win this fight.
I don't see how that's relevant. If I invent a new kind of lock you've never seen before, you'll have to come up with a way to break it.
I'm asking for why a search warrant would be oppressive, even if it involved creating new firmware for a safe.
Why?
What prevents the iOS image from being loaded onto another device?
Apple isn't magic; the code they write to verify device identity isn't going to be the first perfect, unbuggy, unexploitable code written in human history. if(device_udid == terrorist_id) {...} might seem infallible, to you, but the reality is that the device_udid is just SHA1(Wifi MAC + Bluetooth MAC + ECID + Serial). All of those are writable, some via the Baseband and some via physical access. Generating SHA1 collisions is completely feasible for ~$1,000,000 of computing time, which is chump change to nation states.
There is no infallible way for Apple to make an iOS version for one single device.
Edit: And stories like http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/york-da-access-175-iphones-... make it absolutely clear that this is not stoping at a single device.
This is not mysterious. Can the FBI require a software company to subvert their own security guarantees? Should they? Do bank vaults have back doors for the FBI?
That's a bit of a specious argument though – of course, if they produce different software in the future, it could be used again!
If the FBI want their own ability to sign Apple updates, then that's obviously a different situation. But the point you were making – that it's not possible to write software that will run on only one device – is not true in this case.
This is not mysterious. Can the FBI require a software company to subvert their own security guarantees? Should they? Do bank vaults have back doors for the FBI?
I don't really know the right answer.
An earlier comment with more technical detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11141499
UDID lock is good enough for tying development builds to specific devices but is not an unbreakable guarantee the software cannot be run on another device.
Yes, if you can do that, then you can flash anything to the phone. When someone shows me that happening, then I'll believe in this technology.
Even then you cannot "flash anything" to the phone. But you can flash a build signed by Apple which hard-codes a UDID check.
For example changing the WiFi or Bluetooth MAC is not locked down and effects the UDID. Because the UDID was never intended to be a way to bypass the device encryption it was not designed with anywhere near the same level of care and sophistication as handling the encryption key itself.
I never suggested the UDID. Please don't ascribe a claim to me that was never made. SHA512 the serial and macs independently. Job done.
It is foolish to assume that the FBI would stop at this special version of iOS, especially given how they have been arguing and fighting to break encryption for over two decades.
edit, on icebraining's interpretation:
That's exactly right - once the difficult part about targeting an individual phone is finished, it's easy to take the iOS signing key and target any device you want.
Clearly it is not, otherwise they would have done this. They did not.
This is what I understood, at least, from the parent's post.
The question is can you change one devices ID to exactly match another. This might require hacking the BPP or finding a SHA1 hash collision, both of which are absolutely possible but not necessarily trivial.
Possible? Maybe, but if it was that simple the FBI could simply change the signing key. It's not, and they can't.
China required Google to actively censor search results about sensitive topics, and Google quit China. (They may now be heading back [1].)
Bing stayed in China and silently replaced their organic results with government-approved propaganda [2].
The best way to prevent governments from oppressing their citizens is to refuse to create tools that enable oppression.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/why-go...
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/11/bing-censo...