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Huh. The fact that Apple are the only ones that can sign software that runs on an iPhone may just allow them to defeat the DoJ in court.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-24/apple-fbi-...

Apple has indicated that they're going to continue to keep increasing the security of their products in the future, which may make it impossible to update firmware to the Secure Enclave (or at least require the user's permission first), but that's actually a weak measure.

I'm not sure why tech people think that technical means to accomplish zero knowledge is the holy grail, that will never trump having the law on your side. Congress could pass legislation (like CALEA for tech companies) that would require everyone to design their products to make them accessible to law enforcement any time they want.

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There are ways around this that involve First Amendment protections (e.g., an embedded compiler on the device, and features that allow you to download and install packages from source code -- protected speech -- thus adding encryption features).

Can't download? Take a photo of printed material, OCR it and then install. That's hard to outlaw in the US.

I wouldn't agree that it's hard to outlaw, but I would agree that when the original encryption export laws were written nobody had OCR in mind.

It seems like it would be quite easy to outlaw this, the only question is what collateral damage would result from the process.

But isn't the First Amendment already the legal protection you need?

After all, even if a law is passed to protect something, it can be changed later. Not like the Constitution hasn't been... stretched by now.

The US courts are really, really reluctant to ban printed material. If something is printed with ink on dead trees, it's practically sacred.

In the 1990s, PGP was published as a printed-and-bound book in a layout that was readily OCR-able, with code-friendly fonts, checksum and other features to make digital reassembly easy. The theory was that the US government would be unlikely to successfully ban an actual, physical book.

Thought experiment: Apple provides a pamphlet, free for the taking in every Apple store, that when scanned will armor your phone. Extend the thought experiment to a web page that the phone just downloads, compiles and installs (yeah, you probably want that code signed).

This would be hard to forbid in the US. The government would probably go after the plugin system on the phone (which would be an interesting battle). Places like the UK would lose no time banning such media, but it would still be readily available.

At this point you might as well kiss goodbye to the US tech industry as nobody overseas will by anything that has a US government mandated backdoored.

I'm pretty sure if Congress passes legislation mandating it they can influence plenty of non-American businesses by withholding their ability to do business in the US.

Thereby gaining... what exactly?

Law enforcement access in exchange for access to the biggest and wealthiest market in the world.

If they don't buy American products? I don't think so.

Do any of those businesses want to sell their products to Americans? Maybe they can sell different SKUs with those capabilities but they'll have to do it for every market they sell to because the US won't be the only government that will want backdoors.

Indeed. This already works the other way round: companies selling into China have to comply with their "great firewall" requirements.

If that were true then Windows wouldn't have 87% of the desktop/laptop OS share worldwide [1].

[1] https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...

That's temporary. With their latest shenanigans, Russia, China and others are moving to their own Windows replacements. Who would want a foreign government having easy access to everything your government and people do?

I don't think so. So far the history of technology has proven that Balkanization doesn't last and that the markets gravitate toward a dominant technology (TCP, HTTP, Windows etc...).

Your average everyday person doesn't care about back doors and that's where market share is.

Governments accept some level of foreign penetration. The whole spy thing is just a complex game - trust me I know I played it.

Why do you think it would be legal to mention the existence of the backdoor?

If Apple doesn't come out of this high-fiving everyone, I think we can all guess

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