FBI Begins Secret Lobbying to Access Apple and Google Encrypted Customer Data

>The US already makes the USSR look like amateur hour...

Kind of a hard comparison to make, considering the USSR dissolved in 1991. That was well before internet access and mobile devices became a part of daily life, let alone existed in non-primitive form.

While it is convenient to pull out the quote "never attribute to malice..." the malice here has both mens rea and solid evidence. This is not about fighting criminals, judicial process, or even vague threats to national security.

Malice, n: the intention or desire to do evil. Ill will.

I will list a few, but I'm not going to debate the point or google the sources on these. If you don't see the malice here or want to disagree on minutiae, please do it briefly and then let's let it drop.

It seems like malice plain and simple when:

1. Keith Alexander lies to Congress about whether the NSA routinely intercepts totally domestic communications (bear in mind the NSA's stated charter).

2. The CIA deletes their records after it comes to light that they captured surveillance of Congress when Congress started an inquiry into the CIA for illegally putting surveillance on Congress.

3. James Woolsey publicly declares Snowden should be hanged for treason.

4. David Miranda is held inhumanely for 9 hours in Heathrow. He has never been implicated in the Snowden investigation or charged with anything else, for that matter.

5. The Guardian chooses to physically destroy their copies of Snowden's files when pressured by GCHQ. They can at least film the process.

6. NSA programs deliberately weaken encryption, subvert standard committees, infiltrate US businesses, sabotage hardware shipped through the US, and record all traffic at major internet switching points around globe. The stated intent is surveillance completely at odds with all major recognized statements of inalienable human rights.

Malice.

pleasently surprised to hear something like this on HN.

I am not super convinced that public servants are "out to get us", but probably woefully uninformed and living in a certain bubble. Just like how we're in a bubble filled with images of totalitarianism that makes us react so violently to comments like this.

I'm always reminded of Adam Curtis' blog post on the history of MI5(http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER). An absolute must-read. Basically MI5 was lead by people in an alternate reality to what was already happening. Their objectives were not malicious in itself, but their worldview was so insane that what they ended up doing was pretty head-scratching.

Here, the FBI spends their time running after kidnappers or something, and suddenly they can't get text messages from the kid's phone (which is probably the best lead in these sorts of situations), it could be extremely frustrating.

Just by the way, kidnappings are a very real thing that happen extremely often in the US (250000 a year in the USA). Only 115 are of the "stranger kidnapping a kid" variety, most are people they know, so of course the police would like to see the text messages.

"Think of the children" is a tired trope, and I don't think that it's a real argument, but the FBI works on a lot of these cases, and this will hinder their job. It's normal for them to speak up about it. Doesn't mean they should get access though.

Seeking to directly and intentionally harm the rights of the very citizens you're supposed to be protecting, makes you malicious. It is that simple.

It doesn't matter whether Comey is a nice guy or whether he thinks he is doing right. What matters is what the guy actually does. His actions make him malicious. Putin might be insane or delusional and think what he does benefits the Russian people - that doesn't mean he isn't malicious.

Remember the corollary, sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

If he's genuinely worried about public safety and as a result thinks this is a good idea, he should be demonized and driven out of his job, and any related job. If he believes that certain things should be allowed for the good guys but not for the bad guys, he is the bad guys.

But all that is beside the point. I don't live in James Comey's mind, and its internal state is totally irrelevant to me. What he does matters. If he's doing it for what he thinks are good reasons, that just means he's evil and he has terrible judgment -- which doesn't seem like much of a step up from "he's evil".

I am sure that whether he was malicious or mistaken will be interesting for historians while studying "The slide of the US into police state in the late 2020s", but not for the rest.

The US currently supports intelligence, domestic and external security forces that are totally out of line with any credible treat. With too broad power. A lot of it in the dark or shade. That concentration of power and force makes me feel uncomfortable.

It isn't that simple. Your dichotomy is false.

The reality is that police and federal law enforcement are able to acquire private information using other means including knocking on doors, physically bugging devices and people, hacking into devices and other ground work.

The law can have the power to discover data, but this power can be separate from compulsion statutes that force large corporations to surveil, store and copy customer data as a default.

What if there was a law that required you as a private citizen to spy on other private citizens? You would have to keep files on people, but you would only need to give them up if a search warrant or other court order was given to you. Wouldn't that be wrong? The only difference in this case is that Apple and Google and whomever else have filed to be incorporated.

Yes law enforcement should be able to access individual's data. No, it doesn't have to come in the form of a compulsory digital surveillance apparatus.

Imagine if this was the meaning of the "Do Not Track" switch in OS preference panes. (And that the OSes that had it enabled by default, continued to do so.)

Part of that is by diktat - the CALEA law means that they're obligated to have backdoors for law enforcement. This is probably the angle that the feds are trying for, to get things like iMessage covered under the same law.

My impression of Apple's UID is that it's a physical unclonable function[1] whose output is directly connected to the key derivation circuitry. This means that there is, absent physically destructive attacks or side-channel vulnerabilities in the key derivation circuitry, no way to recover the UID/PUF output. Since PUFs typically get their values from random process variation, their values cannot be known before manufacturing. Since it can be used, in very well-defined operations with inherent rate limiting, but cannot be read out directly, there is no economically-feasible way to recover their values after manufacturing, either.

Of course, this is mostly speculation and would need some serious ChipWorks-style reverse engineering to determine if it's true, but that's my impression given what I've read from Apple's security documentation.

[1]: http://www.nxp.com/documents/other/75017366.pdf