Indeed. Americans need to wake up to the fact that these spooks simply cannot be trusted. The very concept of trust is alien to their culture. Would be nice of we could count on congress to provide adequate oversight.

It's amazing to me too that the very concept of an "unwarrantable" space is simply impossible to conceive.

Considering all communication is subject to eavesdropping the space they are wanting to access borders on the realm of private thoughts. And some day soon it just may exist in that realm.

> private thoughts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-ZpsxnmmbE

CGP Grey has a very good explanation of this situation.

Then contrast our potential inability to keep private thoughts with the fact that the government is allowed theirs by merely stamping Top Secret across a document.

I will be reporting this thought crime to the Ministry of Truth.

I don't disagree, but do some countries truly publicly accept unwarranted spaces? I can imagine most governments wouldn't really want to give up that ability if possible.

In some civilized countries, yes. Take eg. your brain (as an accused), a doctor, a lawyer. There are even countries respecting the sources of journalists...

...also military, law enforcement, and other government secrets.

It's always been this way and always will... neverending, necessary security "arms race."

That won't happen unless American voters want it. They don't want it, as evidenced by their not voting for it, so they won't get it.

This absurdly reductionist view of participatory politics comes up again and again. What are you trying to add to the conversation? Do you think that this notion is new? Or that the rest of us haven't considered it?

Instead of a pithy but pointless HN comment, let me suggest a book for you that might expand your thinking on this topic:

http://www.thriftbooks.com/w/do-elections-matter/1470236/?gc...

> absurdly reductionist view

> Do you think that this notion is new? Or that the rest of us haven't considered it?

> a pithy but pointless HN comment

> might expand your thinking on this topic

Just throwing it out there: http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

It would be more helpful if you expanded on why it's a bad argument. Off the top of my head:

> They don't want it, as evidenced by their not voting for it, so they won't get it

Was there a vote on it? When exactly?

Here's a book about how election results can change people's opinions on topics. It applies here because X. I used to think Y, but it changed my thinking to Z. I'd highly recommend it.

Not that GP is any better, but hey... And to be fair, the guy is practically trolling, whether intentional or not.

You're right of course disagreement should be explained better.

But he is responding to a one-line meme whose only purpose is to establish learned helplessness and end discussion that massively oversimplifies a very complex issue and is essentially copy pasted in any article here that even touches on politics. It gets quite exhausting engaging, having long in depth discussion about how this view is overly simplistic on every single thread only to have it appear again tomorrow, exactly the same as before.

I think downvotes and silence is the correct move here.

You're right. I got a bit impatient there. This argument seems to come up again and again and no amount of reason and explanation seems to be able to overcome it, even to the point of convincing its adherents to read what others have said about it.

This notion ("the people get exactly what they vote for") goes back to Ancient Greece; it's not like its a novel topic.

I don't think it's that straightforward. It's hard to vote for something that doesn't come up for a vote. And it doesn't come up for a vote if the right people don't want it to come up for a vote.

"The people" aren't given the opportunity to vote on many things, yet the people they elect do vote. The people they elect often side with their supporters (especially financial ones) on issues that are important to said supporters. A candidate can use their NRA/pro gun status as part of their platform and it will have a meaningful impact on the turnout.

Logically if the US electorate cared even half as much about [topic x] as they do about guns - candidates would care too and "democracy" would follow... no?

(I'm not bashing the US, just taking gun control as an example where a passionate popular view is reflected democratically)

> Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.

What "it" can one vote for ?

“The relief we seek is limited and its value increasingly obsolete because the technology continues to evolve. We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist’s passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a decade to guess correctly. That’s it.

“We don’t want to break anyone’s encryption or set a master key loose on the land,” Comey continued. “I hope thoughtful people will take the time to understand that. Maybe the phone holds the clue to finding more terrorists. Maybe it doesn’t. But we can’t look the survivors in the eye, or ourselves in the mirror, if we don’t follow this lead. “

That's a lot of double-speak. They know that removing the timeout so they can try thousands of passwords per second opens up a huge security hole. What he's saying is "we want it both ways". We don't want to take away security for users, we just want to make it easier for someone who's not the owner of the phone to get into it.

The government owned the iPhone in question.

If the government org in question had followed iOS deployment best-practices, they would have already had sanctioned access to this phone.

Which is a bigger flag for mismanagement. If the phone had had device management software as most major companies provision, no hack would have been necessary.

But it didn't own the software, which is still patented and copyrighted by Apple, and merely licensed to end users.

So an EULA just protected people?

"The government" is not one organization.

That doesn't seem relevant unless there's a dispute over ownership, which there isn't.

Well reset it, and start downloading pictures of cats, what's the problem?

In what sense of ownership?

Public funds purchased the phone. I'm not sure what you mean?

"public funds" is not a single shared bucket of loot that everyone puts into. In this case it was a county owned device.

County governments are typically recognized incorporated organizations that have no real line of authority or connection with the federal government.

So no, the FBI or federal doesn't have some ownership claim that makes it ok to break into. As others point out they have basically seized the device from its owner in the course of investigation.

Unless the county was forced to hand it over, this is not relevant.

can you explain the comment on relevance a bit more? You said it twice but I'm not seeing your point.

Regarding the Director's double speak I think it is relevant. The FBI or federal government is still not the owner. Regardless of whether the device was seized or surrendered the property is still owned by the county.

> What he's saying is "we want it both ways". We don't want to take away security for users, we just want to make it easier for someone who's not the owner of the phone to get into it.

If they have permission from the owner, it's wrong to describe it as trying to get into "someone else's phone". There's no expectation of privacy in a government owned phone.

Who decides paying $1M to get access to a government owned device is appropriate use of public money though?

Why didn't they go through proper channels? Why did they reset the iCloud passwords? What steps have they taken to prevent this from happening in the future?

The FBI is doing a lot of hand waving and there is no accountability. Where are all those fiscal conservatives when we need them?

In my personal experience with an iPhone, it will not backup to iCloud without wifi and it will not connect to wifi without having the passcode entered at least once since boot. According to the government, the device was found powered off. If that is true, the iCloud backup would never have worked.

The government ran its own tests of the scenarios and found that to be true: https://www.scribd.com/doc/303759192/Declaration-by-Stacey-P... (paragraphs 37-39)

Apple's engineer's response left that assertion unchallenged (while challenging other stuff wrong with paragraphs 37-39, see his paragraphs 32-33): https://www.scribd.com/doc/304898553/SUPPLEMENTAL-DECLARATIO...

Of course, you can choose not to believe the government that the phone was found powered off (http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Apple-govt-R...), but I think you'd have to pick and choose what you're willing to believe and not believe from what the government have said.

Finally, even though it wouldn't have helped, it's clear Pluhar's team did not consider the iCloud backup possibility when they were making their examination, so they very well could have screwed this up. It's just that they didn't in this case.

It's also possible the phone was actually found powered on and the battery was drained and it turned off by the time Pluhar's team examined it the same day. It wasn't mentioned if anyone checked it and tried to make sure it was kept charged (probably not). I imagine it might be difficult to train the officers on the ground about mobile device forensics best practices, since they change fairly frequently.

Re icloud, see http://www.computerworld.com/article/3044025/apple-ios/terro...

I would not trust their word over Apple's because Apple has a better insight of the situation.

The whole thing was a very poor allocation of resources. Of course, those whose promotions and maybe even jobs are on the line will fight back any claim of incompetence or malice.

Huh? Apple has no idea what's on the phone, how could they have better info than the FBI on this?

The phone is evidence in a police investigation, they didn't buy it, while its owners are dead surely it belongs to their hiers? or does that whole rule of law thing mean nothing

The phone was a work phone issued by the San Bernardino Health Department, so no - the heirs of the killers didn't assume ownership of the phone. It was always the property of the San Bernardino Health Department.

So if someone the FBI is interested in knew they were being targeted and used a strong, complex, long password which would be impossible to 'guess' even without the restrictions then how does

> and without it taking a decade to guess correctly.

even make sense when there isn't a force in the universe that can guess that password in 10 millennia.

If they demand that restrictions like gated attempts and automatic wipes be removed, they're just pushing the industry to move to restrictions that can't be removed.

Hell, if I was feeling really cheeky and worked for Apple, I would give the FBI their backdoor which allowed them access, but they have to provide the phone a proof of work worth at least $10 trillion.

No this probably couldn't be made secure.

The only way to accomplish the goal in the first paragraph is to execute the steps they "don't want to" do from the second paragraph. It's more than double-speak, it's pure bullshit.

Just think of how many lives were saved by the data they got off that phone. Oh wait...

I hope someone sticks a couple hundred FOIA requests in that hole they speak to the people from. Hold them accountable: "What did the FBI get out of this?"

Is it unreasonable to think there is legitimately valuable Intel on that phone? I'd say it's at least plausible, maybe even likely lives can be saved by getting at messages on a known terrorists phone.

I wouldn't say likely when it was a government-owned phone and he also had a personal phone and went very much out of his way to thoroughly destroy that phone and another. Possible? Sure. But not in any way justifying a "scalable" solution. He doesn't want to look victims in the eye, but he's ignoring human rights activists who have had their identities compromised for less.

Yes. The FBI had offers (from credible firms) to crack the phone from day 2. (After they screwed it up and started talking about it.) They didn't take those offers because they were trying to force Apple into a larger breach.

Why did they risk it? Because they knew there was nothing of value on the phone. If this was the criminal's only phone we might hypothesize that it has valuable info on it. But when the criminal destroyed one phone and didn't bother to destroy the other it suggests there's nothing on it.

I'm sure it has more than zero data. The FBI merely has to claim that knowing if criminals play Candy Crush is helpful to justify it, in one sense. But enough to justify the trouble they put Apple through? Doubtful.

Enough to justify the decades of distrust they sowed in the security community? Not a chance.

Well, heads of US security apparatuses haven't seemed to be capable of anything beyond immediate contradiction lately

To me they seem to be a step behind. Maybe they're just too old.

I think they're farther ahead than you think. Apple is having to stand up against this overreach because the public simply isn't. We here are an echo chamber, but we're hardly representative of public opinion, which it turns out support the FBI more than Apple.

http://www.people-press.org/2016/02/22/more-support-for-just...

"Not scalable" is a good thing! I hope the next phone costs $5m to hack.