Why Apple's fight with the FBI could have reverberations in China

This is the case with most court cases in which social reform is desired...you don't want to risk your case losing because of obvious flaws, because the case will be used as precedent for future cases...nevermind that the court tends to not revisit the same issues, over and over, in a short time span. One of the more recent famous ones I can think of was DC vs Heller (2008), which ruled that the 2nd Amendment applies to D.C. and other federal enclaves, which challenged D.C.'s strict gun control laws.

From Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller

> In 2002, Robert A. Levy, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, began vetting plaintiffs with Clark M. Neily III for a planned Second Amendment lawsuit that he would personally finance. Although he himself had never owned a gun, as a Constitutional scholar he had an academic interest in the subject and wanted to model his campaign after the legal strategies of Thurgood Marshall, who had successfully led the challenges that overturned school segregation

It's not just court battles, but grassroots movements, too. Rosa Parks was not the first person to fight back against Montgomery's bus seating, but she was the one whom civil rights leaders thought would be the best person to rally around when organizing the boycott and pursuing a court case:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks

> NAACP organizers believed that Parks was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws, although eventually her case became bogged down in the state courts while the Browder v. Gayle case succeeded

> Actors can pick what case they want to appeal or prosecute. They pick the case with the best facts and the right time and try to maximize their chance a decision will be written into law.

Looking at it from that perspective, would it have been better if Apple had picked another case to make its stand?

You could equally argue that reducing security is aiding terrorism by enabling a class of cyberattacks that wouldn't otherwise be possible.

They are coercing companies into using their resources to produce software and introduce backdoors that can hurt honest customers. And this will hurt companies like Apple, since security is something they sell.

In regards to subpoenas, can the government read your mind? Should they be able to? Well, our devices are an extension of our mind and if you make the case that the government should have access, that's a slippery slope imho.

Furthermore, this will only work against small time criminals. Crime syndicates on the other hand have the resources to acquire knowledge and protect themselves. There's always the analogue loophole and some would argue that such tactics do nothing but to misuse resources, instead of good old detective work, ultimately hurting the honest taxpayers.

> So, if a Federal judge has issued a warrant, and it is possible, even if difficult, to serve that warrant, the government does have the authority to make that material available to the court.

This goes FAR beyond that. This is coercing a company to do something beyond simply turning over information. There is a big difference in turning over something which already exists and compelling a company to perform work to create something which does not yet exist.

Picture this if served to a small company. Even if the company was compensated for the work, what happens if it takes all of the company resources over 3 months? Will the government compensate for lost clients? Will the government compensate for lost opportunities?

This kind of government demand is much more like quartering troops (government compulsion to perform an action), and we know full well what the Founding Fathers thought of that.

For local backups, Apple says [1] that "There is no way to recover your information or turn off Encrypt Backup if you lose or forget the password." so I'm inclined to thinking it's done with a secure symmetric encryption scheme with the key held by the user. If that's the case, since iTunes prompts you for a separate backup password (only used when restoring a backup), a security-conscious user would probably make that password sufficiently long as to be impossible to brute-force, regardless of any help from Apple.

[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205220

It's not about the U.S. having tools other countries don't have.... when it comes to something like this, if created, it's a matter of when they have them.

Strong security is strong security... creating artificial back doors, regardless of intent, weakens security... We already have a three letter agency whose job it is to crack these things, why isn't the FBI making these demands to the NSA to build?

Correct; more specifically, leaving the KDF retry enforcement behavior writable on locked devices, and in the case of secure enclave, possibly exposing fingerprint-protected keys themselves to Apple-signed updated firmware.

I believe if you have apple's key you can use this to deploy "updates" to locked phones. If a locked phone is powered on and capable of reaching a network, it will automatically grab the signed updates and run whatever code contained therein.

Now I'm not an iphone user and wondering if the auto-update feature can be disabled?

Is there a secure enclave in the 5C? My understanding is that there is not, and that if there was, then what the FBI is requesting simply wouldn't be possible.

I believe the parent comment was referring to "allowing updates of the OS without requiring either unlock of the device or a wipe of stored data" as the backdoor.

That probably explains their acquiescing to American concerns about human rights, torture, press and reproductive freedoms as well as their speedy roughshod trials of dissidents and others.

I really don't see them persuaded by that logic. They'll do what they want to do regardless so long as its impact on their economy is minimal.

That does not follow. RI has to pass the same constitutional muster as CA. We share the same basic ( constitutional ) law, so it would make sense that one provides a basis for another's law because they are under the same purview of the federal courts system.

I guess the unintended consequences rather than the physics matter.

Okay, it is a question of taste.

But my proposition works in more than one language (latin included). ;)