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Yes as far as the actual case is concerned. But it is clearly bigger than that.
Sure but that is an objective reality. If the argument is being made outside of the principle parties then it should just be ignored. It's a red herring.
I get that there are a lot around here to get the difference but its a good way to determine who is worth listening to and who is not.
Yes as far as the actual case is concerned. But it is clearly bigger than that.
In the context of predicting the outcome of this case the larger scope is a hindrance. You have people making predictions because of their interpretation of what's going on. You're not.
We're not in disagreement I don't think.
Here we go...
FBI director backtracks, says iPhone hacking case would set a legal precedent
When asked, under oath, whether or not a favorable decision in the ongoing San Bernardino case might be used as a legal precedent in future cases where the FBI would ask a tech company to write specialized software, Comey replied in the affirmative.
“If the All Writs Act is available to us, and relief under the All Writs Act fits the powers of the statute, of course” the FBI would indeed seek to compel similar assistance from tech companies, Comey explained.
“That’s just the way the law works,” Comey added, “which I happen to think is a good thing.”
http://bgr.com/2016/03/01/fbi-vs-app...ing-precedent/
No we are not.
You are trying to keep your own subject on track which is understandable.
Im just listening and reading to all these "experts" in all these different areas commenting and all their pet theme. And it is confusing, yet interesting, that so many people are using this case to put a label on the whole mess which is of course why the plaintiffs and court will take a more specific track otherwise it would be like the new Republican primary. Chaos.
So Comey says it would set a legal precedent that the FBI would use to protect victims and Justice. So maybe the FBI wishes this case would not have set any sort of precedent, but since it might, they will use it as the world has changed. The old phone books contained valuable names, numbers and addresses did they not Your Honor? And now they don't. We did not ask that the phone books contain valuable information to protect this country but we used them for just that purpose. But damn it took time and the pages were like tissue and often single pages torn out. And people stole the phone books from phone booths or shot at them to determine penetration of certain guns and projectiles.
Notably, the opening sentences to Comey’s blog post a few days ago read as follows: “The San Bernardino litigation isn’t about trying to set a precedent or send any kind of message. It is about the victims and justice and phone books .”
Im trying to weasel out of it for Comey but it's not working.
It could, but it won't because phones are no longer software crack-able after the Iphone 5c.....pretty soon, even Apple won't be able to ever crack their own phones.....so this talk of legal precedent is moot...FBI director backtracks, says iPhone hacking case would set a legal precedent
Wrong, you're still missing the point. If the All Writs act allows them to compel Apple to do what they don't want to do, then they can easily use the same route to compel Apple not to make uncrackable phones.
That's why precedent does matter.
Yeah...I think that's a reach....
Difficult to know where the slippery slope leads to... we've killed Americans without trial under the guise of national security.
Time will tell I suppose.
Latest attack against TLS shows the pitfalls of intentionally weakening encryption
For the third time in less than a year, security researchers have found a method to attack encrypted Web communications, a direct result of weaknesses that were mandated two decades ago by the U.S. government.
These new attacks show the dangers of deliberately weakening security protocols by introducing backdoors or other access mechanisms like those that law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community are calling for today.
The field of cryptography escaped the military domain in the 1970s and reached the general public through the works of pioneers like Whitfield Diffie and Martin man, and ever since, the government has tried to keep it under control and limit its usefulness in one way or another.
One approach used throughout the 1990s was to enforce export controls on products that used encryption by limiting the key lengths, allowing the National Security Agency to easily decrypt foreign communications.
This gave birth to so-called "export-grade" encryption algorithms that have been integrated into cryptographic libraries and have survived to this day. While these algorithms are no longer used in practice, researchers found that the mere support for them in TLS (Transport Layer Security) libraries and server configurations endanger Web communications encrypted with modern standards.
In March 2015, a team of researchers from Inria in Paris and the miTLS project developed an attack dubbed FREAK. They found that if a server was willing to negotiate an RSA_EXPORT cipher suite, a man-in-the-middle attacker could trick a user's browser to use a weak export key and decrypt TLS connections between that user and the server.
In May, another team of researchers announced another attack dubbed Logjam. While similar in concept to FREAK, Logjam targeted the Diffie- man (DHE) key exchange instead of RSA and affected servers that supported DHE_EXPORT ciphers.
On Tuesday, another team of researchers announced a third attack.
Dubbed DROWN, this attack can be used to decrypt TLS connections between a user and a server if that server supports the old SSL version 2 protocol or shares its private key with another server that does. The attack is possible because of a fundamental weakness in the SSLv2 protocol that also relates to export-grade cryptography.
The U.S. government deliberately weakened three kinds of cryptographic primitives in the 1990s -- RSA encryption, Diffie- man key exchange, and symmetric ciphers -- and all three have put the security of the Internet at risk decades later, the researchers who developed DROWN said on a website that explains the attack.
"Today, some policy makers are calling for new restrictions on the design of cryptography in order to prevent law enforcement from 'going dark,'" the researchers said. "While we believe that advocates of such backdoors are acting out of a good- faith desire to protect their countries, history's technical lesson is clear: Weakening cryptography carries enormous risk to all of our security."
Attacks like DROWN show the costs that Internet users continue to pay for mandated vulnerabilities in encryption that gave intelligence agencies a small, short-term advantage, Matthew Green, a cryptographer and assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Ins ute, wrote in a blog post. "Given that we're currently in the midst of a very important discussion about the balance of short- and long-term security, let's hope that we won't make the same mistake again."
http://www.csoonline.com/article/304...ncryption.html
Snowden: FBI's Claim It Can't Unlock The San Bernardino iPhone Is 'Bull '
Edward Snowden, the whistleblower whose NSA revelations sparked a debate on mass surveillance, has waded into the arguments over the FBI's attempt to force Apple to help it unlock the iPhone 5C of one of the San Bernardino shooters. The FBI says that only Apple can deactivate certain passcode protections on the iPhone, which will allow law enforcement to guess the passcode by using brute-force. Talking via video link from Moscow to the Common Cause Blueprint for a Great Democracy conference, Snowden said: "The FBI says Apple has the 'exclusive technical means' to unlock the phone. Respectfully, that's bull ." Snowden then went on to tweet his support for an American Civil Liberties Union report saying that the FBI's claims in the case are fraudulent. Apple's clash with the FBI comes to a head in California this month when the two will meet in federal court to debate whether the smartphone manufacturer should be required to weaken security settings on the iPhone of the shooter.
http://www.idownloadblog.com/2016/03...ats-seize-ios/
DOJ threatened to seize iOS source code unless Apple complies with court order in FBI case
The United States Department of Justice (DoJ) has slid a disturbing footnote in its court filing against Apple that could be interpreted as a threat to seize the iOS source code unless Apple complies with a court order in the FBI case.
The DoJ is demanding that Apple create a special version of iOS with removed security features that would permit the FBI to run brute-force passcode attempts on the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone 5c.
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama has made public where he stands on the Apple vs. FBI case, which has quickly become a heated national debate.
In the court papers, DoJ calls Apple’s rhetoric in the San Bernardino standoff as “false” and “corrosive” because the Cupertino firm dared suggest that the FBI’s court order could lead to a “police state.”
Footnote Nine of DoJ’s filing reads:For the reasons discussed above, the FBI cannot itself modify the software on the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone without access to the source code and Apple’s private electronic signature.As Fortune’s Philip-Elmer DeWitt rightfully pointed out, that’s a classic police threat.
The government did not seek to compel Apple to turn those over because it believed such a request would be less palatable to Apple. If Apple would prefer that course, however, that may provide an alternative that requires less labor by Apple programmers.
“We can do this easy way or the hard way. Give us the little thing we’re asking for—a way to bypass your security software—or we’ll take whole thing: your crown jewels and the royal seal too,” DeWitt wrote.
“With Apple’s source code, the FBI could, in theory, create its own version of iOS with the security features stripped out. Stamped with Apple’s electronic signature, the Bureau’s versions of iOS could pass for the real thing,” he added.
Whether or not the DoJ is trying to intimidate Apple, I do not know. But I know this—that quoted excerpt from DoJ’s court filing has got to send chills down everyone’s spine.
DoJ’s brief is “a cheap shot”
For its part, Apple called DoJ’s brief “a cheap shot,” with Apple’s top lawyer Bruce Sewell saying that the tone of the brief “reads like an indictment.”
“In 30 years of practice, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a legal brief that was more intended to smear the other side with false accusations and innuendo, and less intended to focus on the real merits of the case,” Sewell wrote.
He went on to call DoJ’s move “desperate” and draw this analogy:
“Imagine Apple asking a court whether the FBI could be trusted because, there is this real question about whether J. Edgar Hoover ordered the assassination of Kennedy,” Sewell remarked.
“See ConspiracyTheory.com as our supporting evidence,” he half-jokingly added.
“For the first time ever, we see an allegation that Apple has deliberately made changes to block law enforcement requests for access. This should be deeply offensive to everyone that reads it. An unsupported, unsubstantiated effort to vilify Apple rather than confront the issues in the case.”
“Everyone should beware,” he continued, because “it seems like disagreeing with the Department of Justice means you must be evil and anti-American. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
“I can only conclude that the DoJ is so desperate at this point that it has thrown all decorum to the winds,” Sewell summed it up nicely.
Meanwhile, we now know where Obama stands on the Apple vs. FBI case.
Obama: “We can’t fetishize our phones above other values”
Speaking at the South By Southwest conference in Austin this past Friday, President Barack Obama has made known his stance on encryption and phone privacy.
“If it was technologically possible to make an impenetrable device where there’s no door at all, then how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we disrupt a terrorist plot? How do we even do a simple thing like tax enforcement?” Obama posed.
“If government can’t get in, then everyone’s walking around with a Swiss bank account in their pocket. There has to be some concession to get into that information somewhere.”
“Setting aside the specific case between the FBI and Apple, we’re gonna have to make some decisions about how we balance these respective risks,” he concluded.
“We can’t fetishize our phones above every other value. The dangers are real. This notion that sometimes our data is different and can be walled off from these other trade-offs is incorrect.”
Well, now we at least know that both the President and the Attorney General are undoubtedly aware of what DoJ’s lawyers are really up to here.
Arrest that “rascal” Tim Cook
Making the national debate about the FBI, encryption and phone security even more outrageous, Florida’s Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd has threatened to arrest “rascal” Apple CEO, if it comes up.
“You cannot create a business model to go, ‘We’re not paying attention to the federal judge or the state judge. You see, we’re above the law,’” he told Fox 13 News. “The CEO of Apple needs to know he’s not above the law, and neither is anybody else in the United States.”
So, would sheriff Judd hesitate to arrest Cook himself?
“I can tell you, the first time we do have trouble getting into a cell phone, we’re going to seek a court order from Apple,” he said. “And when they deny us, I’m going to go lock the CEO of Apple up.I’ll lock the rascal up.”
Why are we fighting Crypto Wars again?
In his thoughtful and provoking analysis of the national debate on security, privacy, phone encryption and the Apple vs. FBI fight, journalist Steven Levy offered a brilliant take on the situation.
“So think of this demand as a bespoke Clipper Chip, created by private-sector engineers who must produce it against their will,” he wrote. “By demanding that Apple change its operating system to get access to a single iPhone—and then another, and another and another—we are in the thick of Crypto Wars Redux.”
Levy commented the fact that the government spooks originally claimed the Apple motion was a one-off case until it was discovered that other prosecutors are anxiously awaiting to see how the case unfolds, eager to leverage a potential precedent as a basis to force Apple to help decrypt other iPhones with potential evidence in a variety of other cases.
Who’s afraid of a police state?
Apple’s insistence that the FBI’s request to create a version of iOS without the auto-wipe and passcode delay features might lead to a police state if further concessions are sought may not be as far-fetched as it seems, but that’s just my personal opinion.
And it has nothing to do with the fact that mountains of metadata the NSA bulk-collected from carriers, using programs with code names like Prism and XKeyscore, will soon be routinely used for domestic policing that has nothing to do with terrorism.
That’s yet another disturbing topic dealing with security and privacy which isn’t discussed enough, methinks. As The New York Times so succinctly put it, people are beginning to realize that their smartphones are just the beginning.
“Smart televisions, Google cars, Nest thermostats and web-enabled Barbie dolls are next. The resolution of the legal fight between Apple and the government may help decide whether the information in those devices is really private, or whether the FBI and the NSA are entering a golden age of surveillance in which they have far more data available than they could have imagined 20 years ago.”
I couldn’t agree more with the article.
And which side do you stand on in the Apple vs. FBI case?
This case makes strange bedfellows...A phone is no different from any other personal property -searchable with a valid warrant. Apple knew they would run up against law enforcement issues but they went ahead and opted for marketing over common-sense.
If they 'get away' with this, then encryption will be applied to all digital devices: computers, tablets, cameras, TVs, etc. We will be living in a Libertarian 'paradise'...
Humor my technical ignorance on this, but why can't Apple release a security update to all phones running iOS that would protect those phones against whatever code they create to unlock the San Bernadino phone?
They can...and you can bet they will....the problem (with most) is the legal president which it sets...can a company be compelled to break into its own phones in the future?
Don't even need to do that. But, as noted by Dan and previously, the problem is the legal precedent set, which not only applies to the US, but would be difficult to defend against other countries as well.
FBI may not need Apple to unlock San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone
RIVERSIDE, Calif.— The FBI may have found a way without Apple’s assistance to unlock the iPhone used by one of the shooters in the San Bernardino terrorist attack, Justice Department officials said Monday.
Less than 24 hours before a highly anticipated hearing over access to the phone was set to begin, Justice Department lawyers requested a delay. A federal judge here agreed to postpone the oral arguments in which Apple and the U.S. government were set to face off over whether a court could force Apple to help the FBI unlock the phone.
The sudden about-face was a stunning development in a month-long legal saga, as government lawyers and the FBI director had been insisting for the past month that the bureau had found no other way to obtain access to the locked phone than to compel Apple to assist the government.
“Our top priority has always been gaining access into the phone used by the terrorist in San Bernardino,” Justice Department spokeswoman Melanie Newman said. “With this goal in mind, the FBI has continued in its efforts to gain access to the phone without Apple’s assistance, even during a month-long period of litigation with the company.”
On Sunday, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, Eileen Decker, said in a terse application to a magistrate judge in Riverside, Calif., that “an outside party demonstrated to the FBI a possible method” to unlock the phone used by Syed Rizwan Farouk.
Farouk and his wife were killed in a shootout with police after the Dec. 2 attack, which claimed 14 lives.
If the method works, Decker said, it should eliminate the need for help from Apple.
It could also raise questions about the FBI’s capabilities in unlocking digital devices. “This suggests that the FBI either doesn’t understand the technology well enough or wasn’t telling us the full truth earlier when it said that only Apple could break into the phone,” said Alex Abdo, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed an amicus brief on behalf of Apple in the case.
A senior law enforcement official took issue with that statement and said that the great publicity surrounding the case prompted more companies to come forward with potential solutions.
Newman stressed that the bureau must first test the method to ensure it doesn’t destroy the data on the phone. “We remain cautiously optimistic,” she said. “If this solution works, it will allow us to search the phone and continue our investigation into the terrorist attack that killed 14 people and wounded 22 people.”
Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym directed the government to report back by April 5.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...d0a_story.html
NSA is so overwhelmed with data, it's no longer effective, says whistleblower
One of the agency's first whistleblowers says the NSA is taking in too much data for it to handle, which can have disastrous -- if not deadly -- consequences.
A former National Security Agency official turned whistleblower has spent almost a decade and a half in civilian life. And he says he's still "pissed" by what he's seen leak in the past two years.In a lunch meeting hosted by Contrast Security founder Jeff Williams on Wednesday, William Binney, a former NSA official who spent more than three decades at the agency, said the US government's mass surveillance programs have become so engorged with data that they are no longer effective, losing vital intelligence in the fray.
That, he said, can -- and has -- led to terrorist attacks succeeding.
Binney said that an analyst today can run one simple query across the NSA's various databases, only to become immediately overloaded with information. With about four billion people -- around two-thirds of the world's population -- under the NSA and partner agencies' watchful eyes, according to his estimates, there is too much data being collected.
"That's why they couldn't stop the Boston bombing, or the Paris shootings, because the data was all there," said Binney. Because the agency isn't carefully and methodically setting its tools up for smart data collection, that leaves analysts to search for a needle in a haystack.
"The data was all there... the NSA is great at going back over it forensically for years to see what they were doing before that," he said. "But that doesn't stop it."
Binney called this a "bulk data failure" -- in that the NSA programs, leaked by Edward Snowden, are collecting too much for the agency to process. He said the problem runs deeper across law enforcement and other federal agencies, like the FBI, the CIA, and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which all have access to NSA intelligence.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/nsa-whi...a-ineffective/
The Company Helping Unlock the San Bernardino iPhone Has a Long History of Selling Gear to US Police
The company reportedly helping the FBI access the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone data isn’t a household name in the US, but its data-extraction tools are all over the country. Cellebrite has been quietly helping US law enforcement bulk up its arsenal of surveillance gear for years.
The FBI postponed a hearing yesterday about whether it could force Apple to write software to weaken the security on the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone. The reason: An unidentified “outside party” had offered a solution that didn’t require Apple’s help. According to Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, that “outside party” is Cellebrite, a forensics firm that specializes in getting data off mobile devices. This is an unconfirmed report. “I am not able to comment on the iden y of the outside party,” an FBI spokesperson told Gizmodo.
Cellebrite already has a cozy relationship with US law enforcement. In The Intercept’s catalog of government surveillance gear, ACLU staff attorney Nathan Wessler called one Cellebrite device “a favorite of police departments everywhere.” Cellebrite is making millions from FBI contracts, as Motherboardreports:
According to public records, Cellebrite’s US subsidiary has taken over $2 million worth of purchase orders from the FBI since 2012. Interestingly, a purchase order with the agency for $15,278.02 for “software renewals for seven machines” was signed on March 21, 2016: the same day that the Apple hearing was delayed. However, the “principal place of performance” for that order is listed as Chicago, not San Bernardino.
In addition to the FBI, Cellebrite has federal contracts with the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Patent and Trademark Office, US Immigrations and Custom Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration, and the State Department.
Cellebrite’s gear isn’t only for high-profile terrorism cases or federal agencies—state and local law enforcement also rely on its equipment to get data off mobile devices. The company’s Universal Forensics Extraction Device is regarded as such a gold-standard investigative tool that it’s been name-dropped on The Fall and (ugh) CSI:Cyber.
http://gizmodo.com/the-company-helpi...+%28Gizmodo%29
Predictable....
http://mashable.com/2016/03/25/fbi-i.../#4wpRgbZ7w5qH
The long-term consequences for Apple may be worse than if they had cooperated with the Feds.....The FBI has been trying to hack into the iPhone used by the San Bernardino shooter for months. But this week, when the Justice Department suddenly announced that a mysterious "outside party" was helping investigators access the data, security experts wondered who might be capable of cracking Apple's encryption.
Now, all eyes are on an Israeli cybersecurity company whose past connections and recent movements suggest it may be the FBI's white knight.
Israeli newspaper Yedioth Aharonot reported Wednesday that the unidentified party is Cellebrite, based just outside Tel Aviv. But the FBI and Cellebrite have refused to confirm any relationship. And on Thursday, unnamed law enforcement officials speaking on background to USA Today squashed reports of a partnership.
Mashable has learned, however, that the company's executive vice president for mobile forensics, Leeor Ben-Peretz, spent the last few days in the United States. According to a person who recently worked with the company and who spoke on condition of anonymity, Ben-Peretz is Cellebrite's top executive who would demonstrate its forensics capabilities.
Not really... you can patch a bug. Undoing court precedent is a lot more difficult.
We are in an Orwellian state of war. During normal cir stances, the Cons ution protects the rights of corporations (apparently). But due to this whole war on terror thing, our current situation can only be described an extraordinary. True cons utionalists must admit the founders never imagined such an event (or enemy) occurring and therefore did not adequately defend us from such a loophole. Nonetheless, said loophole exists, which is why, for example, Americans are (at the moment) legally being killed without facing a trial.
FBI Denies It Lied About Ability To Crack iPhone, Also Suggests Cellebrite Rumor Is Wrong
FBI Director James Comey reacts angrily to a similar opinion piece at the WSJ suggesting the DOJ lied:
You are simply wrong to assert that the FBI and the Justice Department lied about our ability to access the San Bernardino killer’s phone.https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160325/10254234015/fbi-denies-it-lied-about-ability-to-crack-iphone-also-suggests-cellebrite-rumor-is-wrong.shtml
I would have thought that you, as advocates of market forces, would realize the impact of the San Bernardino litigation.
It stimulated creative people around the world to see what they might be able to do.
And I’m not embarrassed to admit that all technical creativity does not reside in government.
Lots of folks came to us with ideas.
It looks like one of those ideas may work and that is a very good thing, because the San Bernardino case was not about trying to send a message or set a precedent;
it was and is about fully investigating a terrorist attack.
James B. Comey
... as if we should believe anything the FBI/CIA/NSA says.
Another rumor going around is that the FBI lost the PR and legal battle, and before the court would effectively set a precedent that the All Writs Act cannot be used to compel third party companies like that, the FBI pulled away...
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