Comment by wildmusings | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wildmusings | Hacker News Reader

TLDR for what follows: Mandated backdoors must be a red line, but this is not a request for a backdoor and actually seems pretty reasonable. Trying to argue that the tech industry shouldn't help, even in this case, is not only the wrong position in my book, but a sure way to lose the bigger debate.

My views on the general encryption controversy are:

1. Everyone must be free to make their technology as secure as they possibly can. There can be no mandated weakening of security, back-doors, or other requirements to make the information more easily accessible by law enforcement. On newer iPhones, Apple has patched up the flaw that the FBI wants their help with exploiting. They must continue to be allowed to do that.

2. The government must be able to demand, with a court order predicated on probable cause, that companies provide any and all information that they have that could be useful in circumventing their security features. This can be everything from technical specifications and threat-model analyses, to lists of unpatched vulnerabilities and code-signing keys.

3. It seems to me that American companies have a moral obligation that goes beyond the legal obligations in point #2. They should be actively assisting the government in recovering information, especially when concerning issues of national security. In extreme circumstances, like total war, this should definitely be legally mandated. I'm undecided as to what the policy should be generally. On a practical level, it's probably not feasible for the government to, e.g. start hacking around the iOS codebase themselves, so just information might not be enough.

I'm not too troubled by this court order, especially given the particular circumstances. The right to make products as secure as you can, even from yourself and the government, is what's really important to defend.

Trying to argue that the tech industry shouldn't help, even in this case, is not only the wrong position in my book, but a sure way to lose the bigger debate.

Disclaimer: These are obviously my own personal views and nothing else. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions, policies, or practices of anyone but myself.

I call b.s. There is no possible justification for a company to hand over any private keys, code signing or otherwise.

There's valid questions whether a data set should or needs to be encrypted. But giving up private keys means some entity can masquerade as that key's owner, and alter what that owner has written. Not OK. Authentication, veracity, provenance, of a data set is vital to the trust model. Why would you advocate breaking this?

Second, assisting which government? Any? All? Some? What's the metric?

Our threat-models and business-models don't have the benefit of being law. They must rise and fall according to the realities of the real world that they contend with.

A digital signature does not inherently mean much. It just (pseudo-)guarantees that a holder of a copy of the private key signed the data. Taking that to mean anything else, such as that a signed update was freely designed by Apple with only pure intentions, or even that Apple is the only holder of the private key, is nothing but our own wishful thinking. This court order has hopefully shattered our naivete. The real-world now says that you can't trust that a third-party's private keys are not controlled by governments. It was extremely unrealistic for Apple to include the government as an adversary in their threat-model, claim to protect against it, but then leave this opening.

>Second, assisting which government? Any? All? Some? What's the metric?

When it comes to questions of legality, the simple answer is that the company has to abide by the laws of all of the countries that it operates in. If they don't want to, or if they can't because two countries have conflicting legal demands, they have no choice but to leave that country. This cannot be any other way. See my other responses in this thread for a more detailed discussion of this "but what if China did this" issue, if that's the argument that you're alluding to here.

When it comes to questions of only morality, it's up to the individual people in a company to advocate for the right course of action. Only their own conscience, and the free judgments of their peers, can guide them.

The court order does not require Apple turn over their private key. What it does is compel Apple to sign something with their private key, under duress.

You're basically making a might makes right argument, far extended from a Hamiltonian position of implied powers.

If public key cryptography can't be trusted, and governments are as a matter of fact not fully trusted and in at least the U.S. we're taught explicitly that it can't blindly be trusted which is why we have a written constitution, then the entire trust model fails and we can just stop with all of this nonsense and go back to pen and paper.

Do you still hold the same position if we replace the United States / FBI with China?

Apple sells tens of billions of dollars of iPhones to China every year. If Apple provides assistance to US law enforcement but not to Chinese law enforcement, that's going to be a disaster. But if Apple provides assistance to Chinese law enforcement, that's a different kind of disaster.

Search and seizure is a fundamental government power. I doubt any modern state would be viable (i.e. maintain its monopoly on violence) without it. In the US, we have procedures and standards of evidence that the government must meet in order to exercise that authority. That's not the case in China.

So yes, the Chinese government should absolutely have this authority; they wouldn't be much of a government otherwise. They should also absolutely have protections against unreasonable searches and seizure. The lack of these protections is the problem, not that their government has search and seizure powers. A tech company operating in China has to make a choice between subjecting itself to Chinese law, or not doing business in China.

The same goes for policing in general in authoritarian regimes. The Chinese police state is undoubtedly evil. But I'd bet that most of the time, they're going after your run-of-the-mill crooks that need to be policed in China just as they are in America.

Your argument is a good one though. I think there is a real danger of accidentally building the infrastructure for a future totalitarian regime. It's also a good political argument when it comes to international issues, like Microsoft's argument that the US government can't force them to hand over data that's stored in Ireland. I'd like to see Microsoft win the case in court, but I suspect that the government will win. US court orders are binding even when they require you to break foreign laws. But the government exercising that authority in this case could totally undermine US cloud data providers, so I suspect that Congress could be persuaded to restrict the government's authority here.

> Search and seizure is a fundamental government power.

What's not fundamental is that it should not be used UNLESS you are suspecting a person of wrongdoing with serious facts in the first place. It's never supposed to be an all-encompassing absolute power.

> I doubt any modern state would be viable without it.

There's hardly any data on states that don't exercise such powers, so don't spread the fallacy that the opposite cannot be true. It's not because right now A is linked to B that you actually need A to have B in absolute terms - you just don't know that. We are living in an era of nation-states themselves coming from a long history of monarchical power (an inheriting the same rights and powers, more or less as governments instead of a single person), so it's not like we have ever tried to design societies in a very different way at all so far.

> What's not fundamental is that it should not be used UNLESS you are suspecting a person of wrongdoing with serious facts in the first place. It's never supposed to be an all-encompassing absolute power.

I agree 100%. In this case, the government has a court order for a specific phone used by a specific person who committed a particular crime. What exactly are you arguing against?

> There's hardly any data on states that don't exercise such powers, so don't spread the fallacy that the opposite cannot be true.

I'm sure there's an interesting discussion to be had about alternatives to the nation-state and how they might control the exercise of violence, which is by definition the fundamental characteristic of any system of government. But we live in a world where this authority is centralized (or sometimes, in federal systems, split between different levels of central authority).

> What exactly are you arguing against?

I was arguing about your statement that seemed like a blanket one. I have no problem with the use of search in this particular case.

> But we live in a world where this authority is centralized

Yes, but that does not mean there is no alternative. Large scale societies are still very recent in Human History - and authoritarian systems have largely led to wars up until now, so assuming this is the only working system is just survivor bias at work.

> Mandated backdoors must be a red line, but this is not a request for a backdoor and actually seems pretty reasonable.

This request is not so much a red line, it's more of a yellowy orange line. A yellowy orange line that takes us one step closer to crossing the red line without even realising we are doing so. See: http://imgur.com/xWpvw

There is a real danger in accidentally building the infrastructure for a future totalitarian regime.

Full credit to Apple for actually seeing this and being willing to make a stand.

You know, your combination of (1) and (2) has been the status quo throughout American history. Companies are free to build the safest safe they can. But when the government has a warrant, they are obligated to provide reasonable assistance in opening it. I'm anxious about a move away from that status quo in either direction (either mandated backdoors or companies refusing to do what they can when presented with a warrant).

Yep. But this safe-maker promised people a safe so strong that the maker himself can't break in. The government's request and their response has proven that false, at least for older iSafe units with the default combination length (4 digits). This line from their press release makes me suspect that even newer iSafes are not safe from this safe-maker:

> In the wrong hands, this software — which does not exist today — would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession.

> This line from their press release makes me suspect that even newer iSafes are not safe from this safe-maker:

Please see this comment for discussion about that line of reasoning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11131777

I'm not saying that your intuition here is wrong, but rather that Cook's statement has some subtle nuances to it that some seem to miss.

Agreed. Moreover, the Techrunch author is being disingenuous. The data on the 70 other devices was also "secured" behind a pin even though not encrypted. Apple built tools to extract the unencrypted data from the phones without entering a pin. Similarly, Apple could write a tool to flash this phone with a build that does not enforce the wipe rule. Just because the security Apple is helping circumvent in this case is slightly harder for an outsider to circumvent than the security they circumvented previously, that doesn't mean that it absolves Apple from being compelled to circumvent it when presented with the proper legal order.

I'm surprised that Apple has gone so political against the government here. Despite a massive amount of lobbying by the FBI, Congress has so far given the tech industry the benefit of the doubt, believing our argument that "we're just making our products as secure as we possibly can, even against ourselves." Now Apple is parroting that line even when it doesn't apply, and using it in a political PR war against the government. How do you think Congress will see that? Apple has stepped off of the high-ground and into the battlefield.

> Congress has so far given the tech industry the benefit of the doubt

I think it's more they listen to the NSA rather than the FBI, as opposed to giving the tech industry any sort of benefit of the doubt.

https://theintercept.com/2016/01/21/nsa-chief-stakes-out-pro...

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