FBI Cannot Make Apple Rewrite Its OS | Hacker News Reader

FBI Cannot Make Apple Rewrite Its OS

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94 pointsrdudekul53 comments

Yesterday’s discussion of this link, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11305065

To me the issue is simple: If a criminal you weren't suspicious of shreds incriminating documents before he commits a crime, you don't make paper shredder companies redesign their paper shredders so that it's easier for law enforcement to reconstruct what's shredded. It's a paper shredder, after all. The same way a person's phone storage is supposed to be really hard to get at: that's it's job.

Moreover, it's simpler to blame someone else for the result of your own actions. The perception breaking encryption will solve all their "problems" and allow them to get back to reducing suffering to zero is a fallacy. Our government's historic actions have had just as much part to play in this drama as anything. You reap what you sow.

The real fallacy here is the idea that the government is 100% responsible for "keeping us safe". In reality, it's me that keeps me safe most of the time. I expect them to deal with larger threats, such as North Korea. I expect all of us to deal with smaller threats, and understand shit happens sometimes that we wish hadn't.

And even larger threats than terrorists, like toddlers with guns. [1]

[1] http://www.snopes.com/toddlers-killed-americans-terrorists/

I want to go on record saying I agree with the idea that more control of guns is necessary, and I use this statistic to beat into my father's thick skull that guns are a problem in the USA. But I think a better intro into the problem is Vox. http://www.vox.com/2015/10/3/9444417/gun-violence-united-sta...

There are a LOT of decent arguments people in the US use to keep guns in the hands of their citizens. The most compelling one for me is that if you want to take my guns then lets have a plan in place to severely reduce the number of guns police have. That resonates with me on a personal level but I'm not expecting the police to give up all guns until results are shown on both sides. I can only think of Swatting in the USA. If I can prank call the police and they swat my neighbors house how can we say that citizens are the only problem here. http://time.com/2916554/aclu-police-militarized-report-swat-...

I use swat teams as an example of the paramilitarization of police that bothers me and is another side of the gun problem in the USA. If they broken into houses with battons and stun guns this would be bad but a different story.

I don't have a toddler or own a gun. Clearly, I am invincible.

It's sad when we get people running for office claiming their first priority is "keeping us safe". No it isn't; it's upholding the constitution, it's right there in the oath of office.

Or a code-locked safe. The government can blast in with a warrant, but they cannot force Acme Safe Inc to change their product line to flimsier models, nor force them to work on the extraction-job.

I don't know if that particular analogy holds up. Doesn't the FBI have a warrant for these iPhones? And wouldn't, given the FBI had a warrant for a code-locked safe, be able to solicit Acme Safe Inc for either the blueprints of the safe, or help in cracking it?

> And wouldn't, given the FBI had a warrant for a code-locked safe, be able to solicit Acme Safe Inc for either the blueprints of the safe, or help in cracking it?

Blueprints, maybe, but conscripting company employees would certainly fall under the prohibition that it can't be "unreasonably burdensome".

Suppose you assemble/configure/sell gaming PCs, one of your customers is arrested, and the local police department is understaffed and technologically illiterate... Can the local deputy show up at your front door and force you to teach them how to find the recycle bin?

Also, don't safes purposefully leave soft spots to make it possible to get in without the code (i.e. for when a person forgets the code)? If so, aren't those analogous to the backdoors we're concerned about for phones?

If so, is that a feature they were forced to add by the government?

Yet another aspect of this: people have always used "ephemeral" conversations. It's nobody's responsibility to ensure that the government has access to those conversations:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601044/the-feds-are-wrong...

And another one - So this is the 4th amendment, right?

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Okay - Where does it say in there that whoever is served the warrant must also ensure that the government makes sense of it? It only says that upon probable cause, it allows the government to search a place and "seize stuff". But that's it.

The government can obtain the iPhones and can even obtain the encrypted data. What they do with them from there on, it's their business.

I believe your comment is a really important dimension to the conversation. It has been proven the government could copy the encrypted filesystem of Farook's phone and use this copy to brute force it if they wanted to. What they are asking Apple to do is just make the brute forcing easier which implies this all comes down to mere expediency. Policing is only supposed to be easy in a Police State.

This is a very good analogy. Thank you. I'm going to use this in the future when explaining the issue to non-technical people.

Of course, if I may play devil's advocate: A criminal using a shredder has to go additional lengths of shredding the paper, but encryption is just always-on.

It's as if you had a shredder which magically shreds all your incriminating evidence you leave on paper.

Forget the shredder: the encrypted brute force resistant file system is just non-archival quality paper - flammable, sensitive to light, oxygen and humidity. The FBI isn't happy with the paper manufacturer, because if a criminal writes something on this paper they won't be able to read it in their fiery, ozone filled, blacklight lit underwater crime lab.

Perhaps that magical shredder would look something like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_htzscFkkg

I don't think this is quite an accurate analogy. A shredder removes the ability of anyone (including the owner) to read what was on the documents before shredding. A locked phone retains the ability for the owner to unlock it so it's not quite the same thing.

(Not that its relevant, but I support Apple in this fight.)

It can't be an accurate analogy because the technologies are fundamentally different. But it is a valuable way of thinking in terms of motivations and uses of both technologies. I use a paper shredder for many of the same reasons I expect my phone's persistent storage to be neigh impregnable to anyone but me. I shred paper documents almost daily to keep myself and my family safer. I know of no laws I have broken and I do not believe I am a criminal.

Obama is right - it is an increasingly terrifying world. But I'm more terrified of hugely powerful centralized governments with the ability to get to any person, anywhere in the world than I am a group of poorly organized, illiterate goat herders 4000 miles away.

Just remember the US government is directly responsible for the deaths of more US citizens every year than all terror groups in the world combined over the last decade. Which is a more realistic threat to the average American - being killed by a police officer or being killed by a terrorist?

Is it though? Is it increasingly terrifying, or does the media just portray it that way?

It is; if only for the fact that the very small number of violent radicals can organize more effectively than ever while also having access to better murder techniques than ever before.

I'm personally terrified of the day someone decides to strap a claymore to the bottom of a drone and detonate it ~100 feet above a large crowd. That's the day that outdoor public gatherings become unsafe for the remainder of human history.

Well, it's not. Not unless you live in one of a very few countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Nigeria, or Iraq, http://qz.com/552334/more-people-died-from-terrorism-last-ye...).

People forget that there has always been terrorism and that it has historically been much worse than it is now. Scroll down a bit to the chart of international terror attacks on the US in this report: http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/05/terror-tren... (You can also run your own custom report here: http://smapp.rand.org/rwtid/search_form.php)

The 1970s and 1980s were much more dangerous in the US and Western Europe than the 1990s and 2000s. The idea that we are now fighting terrorists and weren't before is ahistorical nonsense. The idea that terrorism is more dangerous in the US today than it has been is purely a result of politically motivated fear-mongering. In the US at least, there is always a war on something. If it's not the cold war, it's the war on drugs, or the war on terror. It's just another system of control.

New means of killing people doesn't really make large gatherings any less safe. Suicide bombers already blow up large crowds of people all over the world. The drone and claymore is probably already less effective and more costly than the current methods of just holding someone's family hostage and forcing them into a crowd with way more explosives than a drone would carry.

I'm reminded of the scene in Back to the Future where Doc reveals that he got his nuclear fuel from terrorists. The name of the country has changed, but the problem is an old one.

The biggest thing we can do to keep people safe is to stop giving desperate people the means and motive to kill.

That reminds of kids not playing outside anymore (in the U.S) because the media has ingrained into parents heads that there's a boogeyman around every corner.

Are there really that many more pedophiles (other bad actors) now compared to the 70s? Or do the 24/7 media outlets need to scare people?

> it is an increasingly terrifying world.

I'm pretty sure he's wrong about that one, too.

It's definitely an over-reach. If they can force a company to change a product for this, then what's to say they can't slowly extend this precedent to all sorts of abuses of power.

They can draft "Apple" into the military and order it to do it then, there are precedences for this.

And then court-martial and execute Apple for not complying?

And then kidnap and sentence their families to hard labor up to the 3rd generation.

I'm not saying it's right, I'm saying there are far more extreme options that could be used some of which were used before like drafting doctors and union workers.

Before that happens we might actually get a court test of whether the Executive's interpretation of the terms of whatever vague use-of-force resolutions we are waging a borderless, endless war actually constitute a wartime condition.

And then theoretically the engineers could point the gun at themselves and fire?

What precedent are you talking about?

Truman issued an ultimatum to draft coal and railroad workers during the steel strikes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_steel_strike

There was a doctor's draft in the 50's, there was a more recent general "health care workers" selective draft but I'm not sure where it exactly stands.

Basically what Obama can do is issue a requirement to register with the Selective Services Administration as a threat failure to do so can incur heavy fines on each Apple employee. Once they are registered they can draft any engineer they need into military service and order them to do so, if they refuse they can be court marshalled. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_Service_System

This ofcourse will never happen, the most extreme case was under Truman and it was an ultimatum with an apparent executive order drafted but that was enough to bring the steel industry to it's knees and to the table.

The funny part is that if anything even remotely extreme happens we might start to see the seeds of the "2nd American Revolution" the one from so many dystopian novels where the world is ruled by corporations Apple, Google, Microsoft and the likes have enough power to seed the "corporate congress" :)

I'm pretty sure Congress would have to reinstate the draft first.

The draft system was replaced by the SSA it's slightly different now basically they can only draft registered individuals but they also compel individuals to register with the SSA.

As far as I know there is not requirement for an act of congress to actually draft people under the SSA and for anything else a presidential order is sufficient.

While I definitely share the opinion that the FBI is in the wrong in this instance, I think your position is either poorly worded or misguided on the basis of some semantic points.*

To be rather obtusely specific, the FBI has not requested a change in product or even the design of a new product from Apple. I'm sure the FBI was well aware of the subsection of the US code the article is referring to which is why the request was framed as a "one-off tool" to help in an investigation, not a new product, and it's why the FBI itself is not saying it can require Apple, but rather that a court of law is saying Apple has to.

Again, this is nitpicking and IANAL, but the limitations section [1] is pretty clear that law enforcement itself cannot impose any requirement as to...

[...]require any specific design of equipment, facilities, services, features, or system configurations to be adopted by any provider of a wire or electronic communication service, any manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, or any provider of telecommunications support services; or[...]

The request being made isn't really covered by the limitations here. While I have full confidence that the end-game of this case for the US government is to add an exception for the creation of "one-off" tools, I don't think that the FBI's request is actually covered by this limitation.

The authority of the request doesn't come from law enforcement, it comes from a court, fulfilling the intended limitation that law enforcement can't dictate the design of communication technology for its own purposes.

Likewise, while a product of sorts is being created in the form of a law enforcement tool, the FBI isn't actually asking for this to be implemented in the product itself or requiring that Apple make it the standard either.

Furthermore, the entire section is discussing the ability to monitor, capture, and terminate communications, not talking about software or hardware itself, which his shared by the statement released by the FBI. [2]

Again, cannot stress that I am not a lawyer, but I think the interpretation on CALEA is fairly sound - it's not applicable as the purpose of the section being referenced is not relevant to the request being made. I do think that the request is still wrong regardless of any reasons put forth by the FBI and that it sets a horrible precedent, but this article (and by extension Apple's lawyers) are arguing a weak point using CALEA.

[1] - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/1002

[2] - https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2755290/2016-03-1...

edited for clarity purposes

It is true that, as all amateur fans of the law seem to celebrate, you can tangle words and torture definitions until a contradiction seems reasonable, but this is only a part of the legal process, and not really the most important one.

(Warning: also not a lawyer.) Despite the framing as a "one-off tool" instead of a mass-market "product", iOS itself is definitely an Apple product, and the FBI is requesting a custom version of it. Apple then has to sign it as an iOS update, so that from the perspective of the phone it's trusted as a new version of iOS.

The fact that the FBI requires Apple to vouch for it as an iOS product makes the "not-a-product" argument harder to maintain. (Also weakening the argument: the applicability of nearly the same software to replace the OS on an unlimited number of iPhones that the FBI may introduce later, or if leaked, a large number of iPhones in the wild.)

This is when German comes in handy:

- Können sie? (are they able to?): yes

- Darfen sie? (are they allowed to?): some say yes, some say no

In English, that distinction can be made with "Can the FBI do this?" and "May the FBI do this"; yes, they can (they have the ability), no, they may not (the law does not allow them to).

This lesson is taught to children thus: "Mother, can I have a cookie?" "I don't know, child of mine. Can you?" "Mother, MAY I have a cookie?" "Yes, child of mine. You may."

Of course, in English the term "may" is semantically overloaded with a "will they/won't they" sort of question, so it's still unclear depending on how you parse it. But it's unclear for a different reason!

"Of course, in English the term "may" is semantically overloaded with a "will they/won't they" sort of question, so it's still unclear depending on how you parse it. But it's unclear for a different reason!"

Actually that's the original meaning of "may" in english, similar, and derived from the same root, to the modal verb mögen in German, expressing a possibility of something happening.

In other words: - Can (können) = to really be able to - May (mögen) = expresses the possibility, but not the permission - ??? (dürfen) = to be authorized to

The past of "may" is "might", which helps understand it.

Well I think this statement needs to be qualified with the word "currently". The basis for the argument is that there is a law the protects Apple and by that same statement it means a law can require it.

Let alone I am quite sure the Administration knows the law but as they also know, ignorance is something that has value and can be spent and that ignorance translates into many of the American populace that will simply nod when he states something as true having to be true. The is the capital that politicians spend all the time and sadly it tends to work, maybe not in the end but long enough to get what they want

I really appreciate how the author went out of their way to empathize with and humanize the president

Just became not theoretical: http://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/16/03/17/apple-emplo...

What if there was a catastrophic event, like asteroid heading for earth estimated to destroy all life on the planet. and one NASA scientist figured out how to stop it for sure using math formula. But he died suddenly of heart attack. Saved the formula in the Notes app on his iPhone. And now NASA asks Apple to break encryption, so they can access the formula and stop the event that will destroy the planet. Will Apple comply in this case? (I think they will)

What if asteroid is estimated to take out only one country ?(they probably will comply)

One city? Small village? Just one person?

Not trolling, I'm all for privacy and support Apple.

That's worse than the never-ever-actually-happened "ticking time bomb." There is no need to address this hypothetical because the odds of this happening are far lower than the odds of getting wiped out by an asteroid.

Assuming Apple refused, the government would draft an emergency law requiring them to do it, or possibly the President could issue an executive order. Job done.

The question at hand is, does the law as it stands now require Apple to comply with this request, and if not will a law be passed that does require them to do so.

The argument is still the same. This a cost/benefit thing. The cost to society of forcing Apple to comply right now is greater than the benefit of unlocking a single phone and setting a precedent and handing more power to the FBI.

If an asteroid was going to wipe out the earth, well then the cost/benefit analysis shifts quite a bit doesn't it?

They're not asking for 1 specific phone to be unlocked here. They're asking for ALL Apple phones to be built to withstand brute force attempts without wiping data in case they need to access it in the future.

The time would be better spent redoing the scientist's work.

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