Why you should side with Apple, not the FBI, in the San Bernardino iPhone case
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
If a company sells bank-vaults, can the US government have the authority to force them to blowtorch into one of their own products that was bought by a suspect? Can the government force them to include a master skeleton key for every single vault they manufacture?
... Also, remember how encryption was once blocked from export as a kind of weapon? How about we hoist them in their own petard? Let's talk about guns:
Does the US government have the authority to force a gun-manufacturer to include a "remote off-switch", so that police can point a transmitter at a suspect and disable anything they may be carrying?
NRA and well knit group of Gun rights advocates (such as myself) concedes 0 space to the government irrespective of any shooting and casualties. Why cant we do the same for such cases ? One mad man shot some people and we want to build backdoor into iPhone threatening privacy and security of millions of Americans?
Idea is not to get into details of "FBI wants to protect Americans" but simply deny any legislative space to the politicians and executives. The moment people get into the trap of "we need to balance things out" the balance would invariably go towards government on long term, the idea is to simply "deny space" to FBI.
FBI (and full respect for them) should use the existing tools and methods to hunt terrorists and protect Americans. There is a good reason why FBI is expected to work under constraints, that is what makes them good guys. Else there are not really different from drug mafia.
Trick will lie in totally isolating government and security agencies behind the wall of 4th Amendment by stick to original interpretation. If we buy into the BS of "we need to find balance" or "constitution is a living document" then we will have to see US government becoming Chinese oppressive state.
The difference is that the 2nd amendment has text that is helpful to you, and the 4th amendment does not. The 2nd amendment does not only ban "unreasonable" restrictions on guns, while the 4th amendment only bans "unreasonable" searches. Moreover, the 4th amendment allows for the issuance of warrants pursuant to which the government can conduct a search that would otherwise be considered unreasonable. All that is right there in the text.
You don't need "original interpretation" here. You need "living document" and you need to conjure up a right of privacy--one that defeats even a search pursuant to a warrant--that appears nowhere in the text of the Constitution.
My understanding is that this isn't correct, and is in fact the focal point of the order:
> This signature check is why the FBI cannot load new software onto an iPhone on their own — the FBI does not have the secret keys that Apple uses to sign firmware.
http://blog.trailofbits.com/2016/02/17/apple-can-comply-with...
Is it possible for anyone to load a modified firmware without Apple's signing keys?
I'm in the process of pull our stuff back towards virtualization on hardware we control in a DC up the road, it's not that our gov are any better but at least it minimises one risk surface.
Never mind the Chinese then requesting their own backdoors in US products or localized versions of these backdoors. The bigger issue is who will buy their stuff? How do they market their products without being laughed at? EU market might be splintered and can easily be dismissed compared to Asia in volume and EU is currently loudest in terms of pro-privacy (often just so they can say they are in the face of the US to cover their own incompetence (disclosure: European here)). The way I see it from a business pov: if you break a reasonably good product and everyone knows it's broken then other competitors maybe in other markets will move in to fill the gap.
Well, debates about US laws involve how those laws affect things and people within US jurisdiction, who are almost entirely US residents.
And IMO it's a very very good thing when judges decide based on what the actual law is, rather than based on what some transnational corporation's balance sheet might look like next quarter.
It's imaginable that apple could manufacture multiple kinds of devices. Those for personal use and which cannot be compromised via any keys whatsoever, and commercial/enterprise versions which can be centrally managed.
My take is one of the big markets, the US, China, India or EU will tell Apple they either offer the option or they forgo the market.
Governments with large economies will compel manufacturers to provide this option, despite what the company or privacy advocates, privacy minded users would prefer.