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Apple Encryption Engineers, If Ordered to Unlock iPhone, Might Resist

nytimes.com

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Re: Apple Encryption Engineers, If Ordered to Unlock iPhone, Might Resist

#261

Post by jaredklewis »

gaur wrote: post #211
studentrob wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't plan to let that happen. Do you? I'll fight this as long as it's under discussion. Talk to your friends and family, contact your representatives and let them know you care. If we as technologists, the only ones who understand the tech side of things, are silent, then yes this defeatist attitude will win. We need not be silent.

> contact your representatives and let them know you care. Unless you have a lot of money, your representatives don't care. It seems like the only way to make progress is to support stronger encryption, with less of a possibility of engineering backdoors.

Unfortunately, any technological progress is hostage to public policy.

Unless the voting public starts valuing their privacy more, the government can simply legislate around stronger crypto.

They can mandate key escrow, ban encryption altogether, or be old fashioned about it and send letters demanding you hand over the private key. Don't like it? Go to jail.

Re: Apple Encryption Engineers, If Ordered to Unlock iPhone, Might Resist

#262

Post by madaxe_again »

s_q_b wrote: post #252
madaxe_again wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll go to jail. That's the cost of resistance in a totalitarian society.

You do go to jail, usually just court house holding, for contempt of court. That doesn't mean your due process rights disappear. You can challenge the warrant and the applicability of the All Writs Act all the way to SCOTUS. You can even still file a writ of Habeas Corpus. You can even say that you forgot how to make the modifications. The onus is on the DOJ to prove you haven't. Awfully hard to prove what's in a man…

Solzhenitsyn had a good one, on similar lines:

You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power - he's free again.

Re: Apple Encryption Engineers, If Ordered to Unlock iPhone, Might Resist

#263

Post by antihero »

X0Refraction wrote: post #257
snowwrestler wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's probably no advantage; to do business in the U.S., a company must comport with U.S. laws. If Apple moved their HQ to the Sovereign Island of SteveJobistan, they would still have to follow U.S. court orders if they wanted to sell products to Americans within the borders of the U.S.

But would the U.S. populace put up with not being able to buy Apple devices at all? That starts sounding like restriction on free trade to the average American which is something they are much more likely to stand against as the government couldn't leverage fear to make the populace go against their own interests.

Stopping the sale of Apple devices and temporarily disabling US iPhones would probably be the singular most socially impacting event in recent history. If you want people to revolt, take their favourite toy away and blame the government.

Re: Apple Encryption Engineers, If Ordered to Unlock iPhone, Might Resist

#264

Post by swombat »

SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #214
EGreg wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does the government merely name a number out of thin air and the company now has to pay it? Can the government just declare the moon to be their property tomorrow? How would they enforce the delivery of these funds?

At its core, the government can enforce arbitrary declarations because they have the ability to use force against those who don't comply - ie; they control the prisons, the police and the armies. "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" - Mao Zedong

At the same time, there are numerous historical examples of non-violent non-compliance nullifying that power. For example, when the Danish just refused to help the Nazis to isolate, persecute and exterminate Jews in their country, the Nazis weren't actually able to do all that much to change that.

People at Apple just refusing to assist the government is, in a way, the government's worst nightmare: it shows just how little power they actually have.

Some weak forms of political power grow out of the barrel of a gun. True power grows from the consent and support of the governed. Withdraw that consent, and the gun is shown to be a pitifully ineffective tool of government. Maybe this is a historical lesson we need to re-learn.

Re: Apple Encryption Engineers, If Ordered to Unlock iPhone, Might Resist

#266

Post by eggy »

rubyfan wrote: post #175
nhangen wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if Apple moves their HQ out of the country...

There is no place to go. We need to fix here because we actually have a shot of fixing it here.

Iceland with its pirate political party, and it still belongs to the European Economic Area, or Ireland, which has a growing tech sector, and it is part of the EU. Ireland is a tax-haven too. The U.S. government complains about Apple's tax havens, but the revenue lost by this move in jobs, and money in the U.S. is quite a bargaining chip.

Re: Apple Encryption Engineers, If Ordered to Unlock iPhone, Might Resist

#267

Post by fin-serv-arch »

I love what Apple is doing here, and I hope they're successful.

But seeing this, and how Brazil is arresting tech executives over encryption, and how France, California and New York are all pushing for laws against encryption... part of me would love to see Apple release CrippleOS, "Specifically designed to meet the specific requirements of government officials", and establish a policy that every Apple Store employee can only sell CrippleOS to any government official. Let the rest of us living in the free world get strong encryption, and let them take their own medicine...

--- http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/4/11160044/france-apple-encry...

https://news.yahoo.com/york-state-proposes-anti-encryption-1...

https://news.yahoo.com/california-anti-encryption-bill-propo...

Re: Apple Encryption Engineers, If Ordered to Unlock iPhone, Might Resist

#268

Post by tremon »

ethbro wrote: post #188
hobs wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The technologists are constantly ignored by the populace, and major news outlets have been braying about this for years, Snowden being the most recent gigantic newsworthy event where it was in-arguably shown the united states spies on us way more than it lets on, and we should choose encryption if we value our privacy. What is the outcome of this major revelation? Much of the public thinks no different than before in…

Snowden and the NSA dragnet are a bit more abstract than a personal right to encryption on a device in ones ownership.

How so? To me, dragnet surveillance is a lot easier to explain and conceptualize to non-techies than personal encryption. And I use encryption on all my devices (except my android phone, it's still running 4.x)

Re: Apple Encryption Engineers, If Ordered to Unlock iPhone, Might Resist

#269

Post by Sacho »

hysan wrote: post #239
dangero wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is yes on all counts. Apple has engineers in many different countries. To take your question in a completely different way, China could compel their Apple manufacturing staff to install a back-doored chip into Apple devices on the production line. Seems reasonable if the US government is asking for a software back door into all phones.

> China could compel their Apple manufacturing staff to install a back-doored chip into Apple devices on the production line. Seems reasonable if the US government is asking for a software back door into all phones. Wouldn't that be opening a whole different can of international worms? In this hypothetical, - Is China doing this with or without Apple's knowledge? - If not, then it's a very very different situation th…

> - Is China doing this with or without Apple's knowledge?

In this hypothetical, sure. The Chinese govt orders Apple to install a backdoor chip on the production line.

> - If so, then Apple presumably would openly fight this and could even move all of their production outside of China as an extreme last resort.

Moving their production doesn't seem to be more or less difficult than moving their corporate HQ.

Re: Apple Encryption Engineers, If Ordered to Unlock iPhone, Might Resist

#270

Post by jnbiche »

Bluestrike2 wrote: post #145
lugg wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, we can all blame someone else. I like this, "not my job to uphold the constitution", "its the courts fault for letting it get here", "its the politicians fault for going a long with this", "its the peoples fault for voting for them". The fact is, if nobody stands up for this, do you really think anyone is going to stand up and try to take away the back door to the iphone and get away with it? Do you really belie…

Engineers refusing to do the work might be counter-productive. It'd allow the FBI and its supporters to change the narrative to one potentially more favorable to them. Instead of a debate about encryption and privacy, they'd try to change it to a debate about respecting the courts that plays right into the "law and order" mindset. I don't know how it'd play out, but I'd hate to give the government yet another advanta…

> by designing systems that can't be circumvented like this again. "Too bad, so sad - we can't do that any more. We're very, very sorry for the inconvenience."

But that's exactly why this case is so, so critical. FBI is fishing for a precedent that will make designing these types of systems explicitly illegal. Apple is well aware of this strategy, which is why they've chosen to take their stand here, as unpleasant as the PR ramifications may be.

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