Apple’s dangerous game, part 2

Good grief. I would have thought that it was blindingly obvious that if "Apple" can access information on a phone, that means that some employees of Apple can also do so, and I doubt very much that control of that access is as tight as I for one would wish it to be. Closing the backdoor is a win purely on that basis.

Add into that the large question marks over FISA's legitimacy as a court ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveilla... ), and the potential for illegitimate use of the backdoor becomes decidedly alarming.

My way of thinking is to compare a potential backdoor to what would happen if the backdoor doesn't exist. You get a warrant, and now you use the warrant to try and compel the accused to reveal the passcode to their phone. The accused refuses. Now what? Two possibilities: 1) the defendant is protected by the 5th Amendment, and can refuse to answer on the grounds that it may incriminate. If this is how the law goes, then any attempt to backdoor the phone is essentially an attempted end run around the 5th amendment. 2) The courts decide that this does not infringe on the 5th, and is instead covered better by the provisions for warrant-based search as provided for in the 4th amendment. In this case, the courts already have well-established remedies for refusal to acquiesce to a search, which should be used. Again, the backdoor is unnecessary.

When I first read part 1, I was slightly annoyed that such a prominent lawyer would take such an approach.

I have to say I must now applaud Orin Kerr, for taking the time to take the opposing arguments into account, and for publishing those reflections in somewhat of an apology. It is rare that a lawyer is prepared to reconsider their position, especially so objectively and publicly.

I don't get why this is turned into some big political/philosophical discussion.

If the government wants a backdoor and it wants Apple to open up iPhones based on court orders then the government needs to make a law explictly ordering Apple and similar to provide this service.

There is a parallel in my opinion in the legaslation for telecommunication companies in many western countries requiring them to log their users activity and when a court and in some cases just the police requires it, give them the data. For a national telco this is major cost; just in Denmark it was estimated by the former telemonopoly TDC to be in tune of 20 mio usd per year.

No company bears that sort of expense out of morals/patriotics.

Secondly other countries than the US may be interested in requiring this feature of the phones sold in their jurisdiction.

The naïveté in the articles was a surprise to me. If Orin Kerr, professor of law and scholar in internet crime and surveillance, is enlightened* by the suggestion "If Apple can decrypt, so can others", how much would the average lawmaker or judge know?

Keep things like encryption out of regulation; because it can't be.

* edit: was "amused", which was incorrect.

The guy doesn't really understand how encryption and cryptography and infosec work, making the whole article very laborious to read and quite misguided.

Weep for the future of our world governments, which will be shaped by people like this.

He still sounds like a government key escrow apologist, just with a newfound appreciation of third party misuse of the mechanisms.

But I guess it's a good start that he acknowledges there can be "net public benefits" that outweigh the wiretapping benefits, maybe at some point he will start appreciating protection against the security state as well.

The world is getting very squirrely. I feel like when we are talking about privacy, security, rights and such we are awkwardly working with metaphors that are struggling to maintain a logical relationship with the world as it is now and as it will be going forward.

Realistically, a great part of my conversations and hence and great part of my thoughts are digital, therefore aggregated, analyzed, stored, distributed, vulnerable and everything else that comes with digital information.

The spies, the cops, the criminals, the banks, the entrepreneurs are all treating it as a resources they can tap into.

The government does not have a right to wiretap, and citizens are not obligated to make their property searchable by the government. The ease with which the government has been able to wiretap and search computers was a side effect of technological immaturity not a design intention. Heck, one can think of wiretapping as one of the first hacks of the phone system.

As the numerous recent data breaches have demonstrated, we need to build systems as securely as possible. Allowing anyone besides the key owner access to the data requires that the system be made fundamentally less secure. We have presumption of innonocence in the USA which means I am assumed to be a Good Guy (tm) until the government proves otherwise by due process of law. Furthermore, a citizen's desire not to disclose information to the government is not ns indication of guilt (5th amendment). The author of this these editorials either forgets or misunderstands these rights -- accepting the argument that everyone should surrender their privacy rights if they nothing hide. Living in a free society requires citizens take some degree of personal risk.

While reading this article, one real world metaphor kept coming to mind for me: a safe. That's really what the iPhone is; it is personal information stored behind a combination lock.

Are safe manufacturers required to provide back doors to safes for government searches? Is there any analogy to this in the real world?

Among other interpretations, I'm seeing this as a continuation/expansion of one of Apple's axioms: "No comment." Whatever steps they can take to facilitate not saying any more than they have to about anything is a self-imposed imperative. By expanding implementation of encryption they can avoid compulsion (legal or social) to get embroiled in users' activities and have no reason, even no way, to comment on dubious legal or moral activities of others.

The data services involved exist, from Apple's perspective, solely to entrench users in the ecosystem and thus sell ever more hardware. Implementing robust encryption prevents entanglement in anything beyond that objective goal.

The whole premise of the argument strikes me as odd. Users always had the option of running a phone OS that does not send the keys to the kingdom to the mothership.

Desktop operating systems similarly provide such tools either out of the box (e.g. bitlocker, filevault, dm-crypt) or through 3rd party applications (e.g. truecrypt).

Apple's old security model may have been convenient for law enforcment agencies, but that does not mean that they are entitled to this convenience, i.e. that it is reasonable to demand that this security model is the only one offered to users.

So Apple merely switched to a different model that other systems were already providing out-of-the-box.

The argument about criminals going dark with crypto is just fear bating and FUD. The criminals you "really" want to worry about are already dark. The only people iOS8 protects are your standard domestic criminals, which if they hadn't already learned how to use crypto trust me --- they likely leak like a sieve through many other vectors (web mail, pc's, ISP, etc).

What we should be debating is job security for domestic police. Because if we do not put user-centric-crypto in everything one day police will loose their jobs to robots and algorithms. Well, at least this argument is only as absurd as the authors FUD.

How is it that three of the best schools in the country churned out a computer crime lawyer that knows so little about computers? If you go around calling yourself an expert in computer law when you are clearly a layman in the subject of general computing, you should lose your fucking license to practice law.

Does the threat of unauthorized remote access affect the public interest balance much? It shouldn't be impacted by encryption.

Sounds like an apologist and a shill for the entitlement mentality which seems to afflict the entertainment, security, and law enforcement industrial complexes.

Their sense of ENTITLEMENT is ENORMOUS.

"We are ENTITLED to YOUR PRIVATE DATA."

I think is it very naive to believe that the States(any State) side with your interest.

In fact, the biggest crimes against humanity had been come from the state: Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot. They are responsible for tens of millions of dead people, torture, kidnappings or rape and they were the heads of the State.

Hitler or Mussolini came from democracies.

If Apple could access ANY of their devices, they have to tell the NSA how they do it, thanks to "Patriot Act".

This means the gobertment could AUTOMATICALLY access any device, they don't need to ask anybody, only as a pantomime for justifying what they already know.

This is too dangerous, democracy means that power could change if it does not serve the public interest, but people in power want to remain in power by any means.

Part 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8349006

Jeff Bezos's newspaper publishes a legalistic piece impugning Apple.

Who is surprised?