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Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone

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Re: Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone

#101

Unfortunately, there's no good outcome here. If Apple can unencrypt the phone, it will prove to everyone that backdoors exist. If they can't, and they tell the FBI as much, it will just give politicians more reasons sound off about how we have to have backdoors, because this shooter was a "terrorist" after all, and we just have to suck it up and do whatever is necessary to go after people like that. Either way, we en…

Did you read the article? The court didn't order Apple to decrypt the phone. Instead, Apple has to disable the phone's feature that automatically wipes the hard drive after 10 failed password attempts. This is so that the FBI can brute-force its way into the data.

Re: Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone

#103
post #82
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the court would similarly consider that obstruction and contempt. If they tell you to unlock your phone and you try to play some "first you have to guess which finger's the right one!" game, the judge will slap you with either contempt of court or refusal to comply with a subpoena.

IANAL, but I don't think there's much of a difference between asking someone to reveal the correct password and asking someone to reveal the correct finger. In both cases you would be asked to incriminate yourself. If it would be lawful for a court to ask you to "unlock the phone with the correct finger" then they might as well also ask you to "unlock this harddisk with the correct keyboard keys pushed in the correct…

I don't think there's much of a difference between asking someone to reveal the correct password and asking someone to reveal the correct finger.

There's a huge difference. Authorities can force you to give up your fingerprint, but not your password[1].

1. http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/telecommunications/court-...

Re: Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone

#104
post #85

The 5th amendment protects evidence inside the brain of the accused. As devices becomes more and more an extension of the brain, the more I think we'll need to adjust the rule of the 5th amendment to cover things outside of the brain.

I'm having trouble correlating the intent of the law with your suggestion "[No person]…shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself" Person/Compelled is key here, not the facts of the case or where they reside.

So when technology arises that can scan a person's brain for memories and thoughts, that will be evidence admissible in court?

Re: Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone

#105
post #4

Remember, this is an iPhone 5C, which doesn't have Touch ID or the Secure Enclave; the security model for this phone is significantly different from that of more recent iPhones. On phones with a Secure Enclave, the wipe-on-failures state is managed in the coprocessor (which runs L4), and is not straightforwardly backdoor-able. If you're worried about the police brute-forcing your phone, enable Touch ID and set a pass…

Interesting. Let's take this current tech you described and apply it to this situation, what happens. You did some unspeakable act and you are dead. * You have securely enabled touchID Even if you have 10 tries, barring using random appendages your phone can be unlocked right? Edit: on my phone so far it is password OR touchID. Making this easily defeatable with the physical device and my: 1. Hand if I am dead or ali…

All I'm really saying is that the complexity of your passcode matters a lot in this scenario, so anything you can do to increase it will tend to pay off.

Re: Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone

#106

A thought experiment: Let's say the government makes hardware encryption standards in the style of FedRAMP that sets standards for preventing tampering by foreign governments. Then, imagine that a consumer electronics company voluntarily makes all devices comply with this standard. Could a court attempt to compel the company to defeat the standards which the government set as tamper-proof against governments? A secon…

Ironically, many .gov organizations are rolling out iPhones by the thousand because of the strong security controls available on the platform.

Cite your source(s), please.

Re: Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone

#107
post #90
post #4

Remember, this is an iPhone 5C, which doesn't have Touch ID or the Secure Enclave; the security model for this phone is significantly different from that of more recent iPhones. On phones with a Secure Enclave, the wipe-on-failures state is managed in the coprocessor (which runs L4), and is not straightforwardly backdoor-able. If you're worried about the police brute-forcing your phone, enable Touch ID and set a pass…

Even without the Secure Enclave, is it even possible for Apple to do this? The article talks about how Apple could add a backdoor to the OS and update the software on the device in order to break this, but I'm not sure how anyone is supposed to update the software on the device while it's locked, without erasing the device in the process (assuming of course that the iPhone is running a relatively recent version of th…

The court order refers to the need to load the custom OS image via DFU (device firmware upgrade) mode. I am not an iPhone user but I'm assuming that is exactly what the name implies. (some pre-boot recovery environment)

Re: Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone

#109
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is an authentic need to get at the data on that phone What is the authentic need? The shooters are dead. Do we have reason to believe that there is evidence of any pending crimes or any old unsolved crimes on the phone?

If you shoot a bunch of people while declaring allegiance to an organized group known for shooting bunches of people then I think that pretty clearly demonstrates that reading your communications has a pretty high likelihood of turning up something useful in preventing future incidents. If this doesn't clear your hurdle for reasonable search then what would? To be clear, I don't think the order to Apple is necessaril…

> reading your communications has a pretty high likelihood of turning up something useful in preventing future incidents

Would you agree that "high likelihood" is too low a bar for justifying searching the phones of people who live in high-crime neighborhoods?

> If this doesn't clear your hurdle for reasonable search then what would?

Evidence of a conspiracy would help. You said they declared allegiance to an organized group. When they did that, did they say or hint that they had been in contact with that group, other than, say, watching public YouTube videos?

Re: Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone

#110
post #85

The 5th amendment protects evidence inside the brain of the accused. As devices becomes more and more an extension of the brain, the more I think we'll need to adjust the rule of the 5th amendment to cover things outside of the brain.

Think about what we want as a society though. If you did commit a crime, we want to convict you. The reason the 5th protects you from compelled self-incrimination is to prevent unjust interrogation and investigation techniques from the cops[0], not to make the overall likelihood of conviction lower, although it incidentally has this effect.

From a policy standpoint the ideal world would be one where all criminals are convicted and no innocents are convicted. In our system we try [see 0 again] to err on the side of letting criminals go rather than convicting innocents.

One of the interesting things about the new normal of everything being recorded always and everywhere is how this might change our laws. Laws are supposed to accomplish something, speeding law is supposed to improve road safety for example. If automatic enforcement instead imposes massive taxes on everyone while not improving road safety, society (should) modify the law since it didn't get them to where they wanted to go.

Sorry, long winded way of saying, our electronic artifacts aren't really all that different than letters. If I wrote an email to my friend demonstrating premeditation in murdering your puppy, you and everyone else have an interest in that email being valid evidence. That's a wholly separate discussion from the encryption debate. I definitely you're right that we need to think about it but I just wanted to play devils advocate here for why we might want to think twice.

[0] Yes, shit still happens, but the system is SUPPOSED to limit these abuses.

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