Apple to Close iPhone Security Hole That Police Use to Crack Devices

The OP specifically said the login prompt was defeated by backspacing alone.

That's an interesting technical problem. A lot of people dismiss it as impossible out of hand, but they are underestimating what you can do with modern cryptography.

You make it a distributed back door that requires several independent third parties to cooperate to use it.

You choose the third parties so that no particular warrant seeker will be able to get enough power or influence over enough of the third parties to force them to enable the back door unless they think the use is valid and just. (You can actually design it so that the warrant seeker does not know who the third parties are).

Some aspects of this may be too complicated to be practical, but it is not impossible.

I think you're ignoring some aspects of how the US criminal justice system works. Arresting a child abuser is one thing; they have to be tried in court and found guilty by a jury/judge. Criminal cases especially have a high requirements to prove guilt since they are very serious charges. So even if unlocking the phones may not help save actual children from abuse, I think what the guy means is that you can get more convictions for these child abusers who have been arrested and prevent future children from being abused.

Note that I'm not stating an opinion about the ethics of reducing security of phones, only pointing out what the person meant when he said that doing so prevents child abuse.

The technology to create digital images and videos has gotten cheaper. Securely transmitting and storing media, and securely communicats regarding it has become more accessible too.

I'm not advocating for or against iphone unlocks (or the generic abstract backdoor), but I think it is dangerous to think that serious crimes of this nature are extremely rare, or somehow far less common than they were in the past.

On the flipside, if you are right - and identifying material that saves children from this kind of crime is indeed a rare event - then isn't a possible reason the ready encryption of such devices? Food for thought.

Apple would have to buy one on the grey market, which they may be unprepared to do

If everything you do in your daily life is recorded that is a significant privacy issue. More so than your private photos/text messages and GPS coordinates alone.

Apple is working on AR glasses, and is significantly promoting AR SDKs with their newest iOS releases. It's very easy to see why they take this privacy stance today.

> Total surveillance would result in more crimes being solved

With perfect and total information how would fewer crimes be solved?

Semantics, but I don't think it is necessarily the "power", so much as it is a new vector to get the evidence they feel that they need to perform their job with less effort. It is a lazy method that circumvents the laws that stand in their way for good reasons.

This. Freedom isn't free.

"How many kids have to die before you give up your..."

"All of them you twat!"

What does either of those things have to do with decrypting things found inside either the safe or the iPhone?

If the FBI found coded papers inside a safe, they could try to decrypt those papers, but couldn't compel the owner to assist them.

Security flaws are fair game for law enforcement. Secure encryption without exploitable weaknesses will probably defeat them even in the presence of a court order.

Authourities must first gain access to premises with a warrant and then get a safe cracker in.

VS: authourities (at an airport or just about anywhere) take the phone off the person, there is a layer of obsfucation as to whether a warrant has been obtained or is needed, and data is collected.

If you look at the history of digital data (ie echelon etc) there is a clear trend for vast data hovering of all and any resources. This is not possible with physical data, as it leaves behind a more concrete trail when authorities go after it, and causes them to (generally) be more selective about what they are doing

Were this true, crimes would have been practically unsolvable before about the mid 1990s. Back then nobody carried pocket computers/communicators (encrypted or otherwise) and criminals also largely failed to make paper records of their crimes.

You can't smuggle guns via SMS. You can't vandalize shop windows over the Internet. You can't kill people with a digital photograph. Most crimes, and especially the violent crimes that scare people the most, require physical actions that leave physical traces.

The major exception would seem to be certain white collar crimes: insider trading, trade secret theft, perhaps tax evasion and other financial shenanigans. That's where I can see secure electronic devices making law enforcement significantly harder. But when LEOs speak against encryption in public they usually seem to invoke killers and kidnappers, as if victims' bodies were now regularly hidden inside encrypted iPhones instead of car trunks and shallow graves. Maybe LEOs believe their own rhetoric or maybe they just realize that "think of the victims of inside trading!" isn't the sort of terrifying scenario that will get the public on their side.

Fun conversation topic. A large proportion of people cannot comprehend such a concept.

I don't see any reason why encrypting it couldn't be a toggle switch, not on by default, though.

Incidentally, that article includes suicide. Leaving aside the issue of whether or not somebody should be permitted to make such a decision about their own life, statistics don't apply to individuals in the way you are implying. While you could determine that owning increases the rate of successful suicide in a population, you cannot say it makes that man right there, named Bob more likely to kill himself. Because you don't know anything about Bob. Bob may be the sort of man who never even fleetingly contemplates suicide once in his entire life. If Bob were such a man, owning a gun would not make it particularly likely for Bob to commit suicide.

Furthermore whether or not Bob trusts his wife to not murder him with his gun is a matter completely removed from whether or not Bob ever uses his gun in self defense, or whether he owns it for self defense but never uses it for self defense (the later being orders of magnitude more common.)