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…
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
#102Can't they use the dead guys finger print?
Re: Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone
#103Earlier 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…
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
#104The 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.
Re: Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone
#105Remember, 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…
Re: Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone
#106A 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.
Re: Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone
#107Remember, 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…
Re: Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone
#108Re: Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone
#109Earlier 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…
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
#110The 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.
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.