Somehow we have been doing fine under the constitution for 200 years. Now a dozen men kamikaze a building, and we have to take away everyone's freedom in order to protect them?

F that. Police and the executive branch are just being lazy. Get off your ass, do some human intelligence, investigate leads, and get a warrant if you have probable cause. Otherwise, get the hell out of my email.

When the chances of being killed by police are 55x higher than being killed by a terrorist (or whatever the recent number was) and we want to give the State more power, we are fools.

The FBI (who is responsible for all intelligence conducted in the USA, against foreigners or Americans) is absolutely required to get a search warrant.

The iPhone is one of the most popular phones in the world. Is it that crazy that the CIA is interested in them for intelligence gathering purposes?

The point the original commentor was trying to make is that this type of work is much more preferable to the mass collection that you're referring to from the Snowden documents.

Edit to expand on "should be doing": at the very least, they ought to explore such vulnerabilities as a defensive measure since their counterparts in every other State are clearly doing the same thing whenever they have the capability.

The reason for mass surveillance is control of the populace. Mass surveillance clearly doesn't prevent terrorism: most of this 4th-Amendment-violating dragnet surveillance was in place well before the Boston Bombing, and nobody caught the Tsarnaevs.

So, I'm not a little torn, either: the CIA shouldn't be looking to crack iPhones, they should be looking to beef up iPhone security to keep those other nations from doing unethical stuff. Exploiting vulnerabilities for surveillance purposes is a bad thing all around. Close them holes!

I do not believe that the CIA, as it seems to exist today, is capable of doing that manner of subversion in a targeted way, they have gone rogue. I do not think that the CIA allows itself to be overseen. That part of the question is just not possible to answer.

The CIA, as it appears now, does a huge number of unethical and apparently illegal things. It appears to be beyond oversight or control. I do find it really hard to support any action by them, just as I would find it hard to support FSB or MI6 actions. The CIA appears to be a threat to civil liberties and representative democracy in the US itself right now.

But you're falling into a rhetorical trap: just because coffee is hot, you don't wait until the coffee is cold to drink it. You can judge relative degrees of hot, just as we can judge relative degrees of unethicality. It's pretty darn bad to assassinate US citizens without due process, and I'd say due process in public, whether the citizen is abroad or on homeland soil. It's pretty darn bad to torture anyone. It's less bad to attempt to crack iOS to spy on people, and it would be even less wrong to explore the exploitability of iOS. The latter may not be wrong at all. It's completely OK to analyze open source intelligence.

They were on the radar but you really can't arrest someone until they do something.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/tag/ndaa

Edit:: link for more info

I did read that link, along with many other linked pages from the original link.

See here: https://www.aclu.org/national-security/president-obama-signs...

And here: http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/three_myths_about_the_detent...

There does seem to be a lot of debate on this topic regarding the wording of the bill and how it applies to US citizens. However, to me, the wording seems very vague and open to interpretation. Which was likely on purpose.

by manipulating Xcode, the spies could compromise the devices and private data of anyone with apps made by a poisoned developer — potentially millions of people ...

The focus of the security researchers, as described at the CIA conferences, was to target the GID key, which Apple implants on all devices that use the same processors. [...] So, if intelligence agencies extract the GID key, it means they have information useful to compromising any device containing that key.

Just like the intelligence gleaned from breaking German WWII encryption was limited?

If information can be non-invasively extracted, then there is only an operational limit on use. And isn't knowing mass information just as wrong as acting on mass information?

Unless it's a computationally-expensive attack (which are getting more infeasible now that key sizes aren't technically as limited), you run into the encryption problem: either everything being encrypted is okay, or nothing being encrypted is okay.

That's the nature of secrecy.