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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

#301

Post by bsbechtel »

harryh wrote: post #286
bsbechtel wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that courts don't have ways to handle edge cases is a huge problem with our case law style legal system.

You ever get in a fight with someone? You ever get in a fight where it wasn't 100% clear who was right and who was wrong? You were both a little bit right and a little bit wrong? Welcome to the problems our legal system has to deal with. The world isn't a mathematical equation. It's fuzzy. So is our legal system.

I think my comment was misinterpreted. Our legal system is a part of our government, which is a representative democracy. Part of the idea behind a representative democracy is that it is designed to protect the minority from majority mob rule. By definition, edge cases are cases that fall outside of the normal majority. Our legal system is fuzzy because it is operated by humans, not silicon.

The design of a case law system however, which the U.S. operates under, is intended to minimize fuzziness by looking at case precedent for guidance on issues moving forward. So in a sense, case law is intended to be the legal equivalent of mathematical proofs in the courtroom. Obviously this analogy isn't 100% correct, but the main reason it can't be is because of the thousands of edge cases that come up in real life...edge cases that are minority cases intended to be protected by representative democracy, but the case law legal system has difficulty actually doing so because of the design of the case law system. See the conflict? Completely lost yet?

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

#302

Post by DickingAround »

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #292
ars wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1: Yes. 2: Yes. 3: No, but they will probably be the ones asked anyway, and then yes, they would be legally required. 4: Apple. 5: What's the question? Is the question will they be compensated? Then yes. 6: They can't. They don't own their stock. Bad PR is not a good enough reason. You are treating the court like a mathematical proof and finding edge cases. I used to as well. But courts don't work that way at all - t…

>They analyze things on a human level This (and the job prospects) are the reason I choose computer science/software engineering over being a lawyer even though most people who commented on what I should be say I should be a lawyer. The law requires not just thinking like a human, but accepting such thought as valid. To me the logic is exactly the same behind any racist who makes special exceptions for all minority p…

This is an amazing meta-point here; the people on the other side of this debate seem to have no need for logical cohesion.

I might extend that a bit to ask 'what is the consequence of such lack of cohesion'? Perhaps first that getting agreement on anything needs to be done at a close to case-by-case basis since there is a weaker adherence to standards. This can introduce favoritism (e.g. some people get hit for pot and others don't). Another consequence might be up-front costs. Not needing to think too deep about edge cases and whatnot is clearly less time-cost to run first-time-seen cases. This in turn means people won't hesitate as much in setting new precedence because they won't notice when they do. Another consequence would be inability to get consistency across and entire system since not everything can be debated by all and there's not clear rules.

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

#303

Post by dcposch »

tptacek wrote: post #11
ars wrote: post #2

> Apple ... will probably have little time to debug or test it overall, meaning that this feature it is being ordered to build will almost certainly put more users at risk. Eh? They are not being asked to install it to the public at large, just one phone. Of all reasons to object, this reason makes little sense.

That's true. In fact, if it's possible for Apple to accomplish what DOJ is demanding of it, the best outcome would be for DOJ to succeed, and do so publicly: * There is an authentic need to get at the data on that phone * There's no likelihood at all that other users will be impacted by the backdoor * We'll all be on the same page about how secure these phones are versus the USG. It's possible that they can prevail a…

> * There's no likelihood at all that other users will be impacted by the backdoor

That could not be further from the truth. They are trying to set a precedent that endangers the future of consumer end-to-end encryption.

They are trying to repurpose an 18th-century law (the All Writs law) to force Apple to help them break iPhone encryption.

If this case creates precedent, what is to stop them from, say, forcing Signal and Google to work together to deliver a backdoored app update to a specific user?

You are not a lawyer. Nate Cardozo, staff attorney at the EFF, had this to say: https://twitter.com/ncardozo/status/699964225737748481

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

#304

Post by Spooky23 »

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #295
Spooky23 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the courts have this one right. Your finger is a characteristic of you, not compelled speech. If you can compel a suspect to stand up on a lineup, or produce id, there's no reason why the court shouldn't be able to compel you to produce a finger. In technical terms, the finger is really a "something you have" second authentication factor. If you think of it on those terms, it's more like looking at someone's…

>Your finger is a characteristic of you, not compelled speech. So is all your knowledge. The technology to extract it doesn't yet exist, but once it does, should it be deployed by the courts without a challenge from the 5th Amendment?

Clearly there's going to have to be some evolution from a legal standpoint once accessing your thoughts is a mere fMRI away.

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

#305

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ars wrote: post #157
philip1209 wrote: post #70

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…

1: Yes. 2: Yes. 3: No, but they will probably be the ones asked anyway, and then yes, they would be legally required. 4: Apple. 5: What's the question? Is the question will they be compensated? Then yes. 6: They can't. They don't own their stock. Bad PR is not a good enough reason. You are treating the court like a mathematical proof and finding edge cases. I used to as well. But courts don't work that way at all - t…

> They analyze things on a human level, not a mathematical level.

Courts analyse things on a political level. It has less to do with what normal humans think is right and more to do with causing the outcome the judge wants to occur.

The result is that the better judges are more consistent (and then get celebrated when the outcome in a specific case is politically popular but pilloried for creating "loopholes" when it isn't), whereas the worse judges find a way to make the politically popular thing happen no matter how tortured the logic it takes to get there is. And the existence of the second class destroys the rule of law, because you get in front of one of them and it doesn't matter what you did, it only matters if the judge likes you.

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

#307

Post by kirykl »

The implications are quite important for future technologies. Neural implants for example. Neural implants are currently used for prosthetics and paralysis. A forced backdoor would kill all research to develop a co-processor directly linked to the brain. Who would want a government backdoor directly to the brain

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

#308

Post by avs733 »

ars wrote: post #208
philip1209 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

re: statue of limitations - if we are talking exponential levels of difficulty to crack vs. exponential increases in computing power (Moore's law) I wonder whether "we won't have the computing power to crack this for X years, so a statute of limitations of (X-1) years to solve this means that we are functionally unable to answer the question within the allotted time" becomes defensible as a reason to call something "…

Statue of limitations is only until the court date. Once that starts there is no statue of limitations, even if the case takes years. The closest I can think of is a right to a speedy trial, but that has so many exceptions (for example if the person is out on bail) that I couldn't say how a judge would rule in this scenario. Especially if it was the defendant causing the delay by refusing to reveal the password and m…

specifically in this case, the only non-John Doe defendant I am aware of is dead so those provisions do not apply.

The FBI is not doing this for proceedings related evidenciary purposes but instead for investigative purposes. No one has been charged here (from what I know) so the issue of speedy trials is moot while the statue of limitations on the crimes under investigation are likely extremely long if they exist at all.

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

#309

Post by superuser2 »

ethbro wrote: post #284
superuser2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, the part where the phone's owner is dead.

Do dead guys not have functional fingerprints? (Yes, I really asked that. Yes, I'm really curious.)

He had a 5C, so wouldn't help here.

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

#310

Post by avs733 »

bsbechtel wrote: post #301
harryh wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You ever get in a fight with someone? You ever get in a fight where it wasn't 100% clear who was right and who was wrong? You were both a little bit right and a little bit wrong? Welcome to the problems our legal system has to deal with. The world isn't a mathematical equation. It's fuzzy. So is our legal system.

I think my comment was misinterpreted. Our legal system is a part of our government, which is a representative democracy. Part of the idea behind a representative democracy is that it is designed to protect the minority from majority mob rule. By definition, edge cases are cases that fall outside of the normal majority. Our legal system is fuzzy because it is operated by humans, not silicon. The design of a case law…

>The design of a case law system however, which the U.S. operates under, is intended to minimize fuzziness by looking at case precedent for guidance on issues moving forward.

Sorry if this comes out as pedantic but I think it is important. Case law is not intended to minimize fuzziness but to address occurrences of fuzziness.

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