does the FBI now compel them to return to Apple and write the software or go to jail? I can't imagine any way in hell that would fly. The only remotely conceivable path to doing something like that would be to have Congress implement a draft, and draft them into the military. Anything else would almost certainly violate the 13th and/or 10th Amendments to the Constitution. And the draft thing is probably a stretch as…
I sure can, and fully expect it to eventually happen, unfortunately. The sad part is, As Tim Cook said, all this will do is push the bad guys to use an encryption app from somewhere else. I have a good deal of experience in the US criminal justice system, and the one thing everyone I've met and done time with inside the system, from bank robbers to drug dealers to murderers say is, in the end, "They (the courts and p…
Unless you can afford good lawyers to put on a good defense. Then you get a Netflix show.
Well, my tech-illiterate grandfather knows about this debate, and all he can understand is that the FBI has a terrorist's phone and Apple is obstructing their investigation. He thought encryption was something we could easily ban, and he's a civil engineer. I walked him through it mathematically, then gave examples until he understood, but not everyone has a technical background. We are losing because we aren't prese…
The problem is people have a hard time of wrapping their head around the idea that an encryption backdoor, once created, is at extreme risk of being leaked to others and can not be contained. This is something that I find is hard to explain to nontechnical people because it isn't intuitive of our understanding of the real world. E.g. "If a bank can keep my money from being stolen, then surely you can keep this backdo…
Point to TSA locks and the New York City master keys. Both systems are similar enough to encryption backdoors, and both systems have already been compromised.
Then they explain why it doesn't work to a judge and the judge decides if it doesn't work for a good reason or if it doesn't work because someone intentionally screwed it up. If it was for a good reason then welp. Sometimes shit doesn't work. Oh well. If they intentionally screwed it up then they could be found in contempt of court and fined and/or jailed. In either case the would be asked to try again if that was fe…
But how would a judge have the technical know-how to make that determination? If the answer is to have security experts listen in an make the call, would that even be legal since one of the requirements is to allow Apple to keep this in-house for fear of leaking said code? One last final question, if they do force the engineers to come in and explain themselves over and over to the government's satisfaction, that wil…
>But how would a judge have the technical know-how to make that determination?
They would ask a jury of people not sly enough to get out of jury duty (maybe with one or two people who are there because they want to do their civil duty). It will not be your peers, but it will be your peers as the government determines.
They could be fined hundreds of thousands daily for refusing to act. We recently found out this happened to Yahoo in 2008 [1] via the FISA court. Apple shareholders wouldn't like that. I'm pretty sure Tim Cook and his lawyer mean it when they say they will comply with the law. Apple engineers need not worry so much about quitting their jobs over this. If I were there I would stick with Tim Cook. Consider, If Apple lo…
If they charged Apple a million dollars a day... They could just pay indefinitely and still be in a comfortable financial position... The expense may actually prove valuable as their willingness to "pay the cost of defiance" might make them seem more appealing to customers and increase the value of their products.
> If they charged Apple a million dollars a day... They could just pay indefinitely
It doesn't work that way:
"dolske 7 hours ago: The feds threatened Yahoo with a fine of $250,000/day, _doubling every week_. It doesn't take long for that to become astronomical."
In just 26 weeks it's 16 trillions per day if I calculated right.
I think Lavabit wasn't about All Writs, rather it was a simple pen/trace order? Lavabit's problem was that they actually had access to the data, so they were capable of providing records and they didn't provide them. Then pen/trace laws require cloud email providers to provide this data to LE upon authorized request, and case law does not really support payment for hours expended to implement any data collection solu…
It looks like Lavabit filed an amicus/"friend of the court" brief in the Apple case: http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/07/apple-vs-fbi-lavabit-warns-... Despite the differences in the two cases, it makes sense that Lavabit would want to help defend Apple's position.
They could be fined hundreds of thousands daily for refusing to act. We recently found out this happened to Yahoo in 2008 [1] via the FISA court. Apple shareholders wouldn't like that. I'm pretty sure Tim Cook and his lawyer mean it when they say they will comply with the law. Apple engineers need not worry so much about quitting their jobs over this. If I were there I would stick with Tim Cook. Consider, If Apple lo…
> this becomes a gigantic public debate where we scramble to enact legislation that removes this power from the government. No such thing will happen. The public will forget this ever happened, and politicians will do nothing to prevent the government from doing this again.
I completely agree. In fact there is already a mechanism for doing what they want done, generally. They get a search warrant, they get a judge to compel a suspect to unlock his phone, refusal results in jail time for contempt of court. There is prior law for all of that. Nobody seems to care that we are talking about doing the search without the judiciary. This is all purely for fishing. Either fishing or they believe that there are all these real life episodes of 24 being played out, which isn't true.
Your nativity on how "criminal justice" and law enforcement works is kinda astounding to me. If a judge orders an injunction against these citizens and they don't comply, he won't fine them, he will jail them, which is an incredible hardship, esp. against people not used to the prison industrial complex and its dehumanizing effects. Perhaps sitting in jail for weeks or months will endure these guys to the IT masses a…
Can the court order you to do something you don't know how? If you can show these people would know how to do it, then it must be common enough knowledge that the courts could find someone else. If it is highly specialized knowledge that only these people might even know, then you can't prove that they do know how to do it. Either way, you can't justify forcing them to do it. And it is if we are even fine with slaver…
You are butting up against the edges of how the system works. It's all a bit confusing out here, until you realise that it's not about fairness or law or reason. It's about power, no one really cares, they will jail them whether they know how to do it or not. People like to imagine that they live in an egalitarian state, it's nonsense. It's not even a democracy, that word has been bastardised. Technically we live in an elective aristocracy.
They could be fined hundreds of thousands daily for refusing to act. We recently found out this happened to Yahoo in 2008 [1] via the FISA court. Apple shareholders wouldn't like that. I'm pretty sure Tim Cook and his lawyer mean it when they say they will comply with the law. Apple engineers need not worry so much about quitting their jobs over this. If I were there I would stick with Tim Cook. Consider, If Apple lo…
Apple has quarter trillion dollars of cash on hand. Without calculating interest or expected value, at 100k a day, Apple could hold out for over a millennium. I'm sure Apple has a legal army gaming out each one of these scenarios.
> Apple could hold out for over a millennium.
No, it doesn't work that way (see the post from dolske 7 hours ago):
They could be fined hundreds of thousands daily for refusing to act. We recently found out this happened to Yahoo in 2008 [1] via the FISA court. Apple shareholders wouldn't like that. I'm pretty sure Tim Cook and his lawyer mean it when they say they will comply with the law. Apple engineers need not worry so much about quitting their jobs over this. If I were there I would stick with Tim Cook. Consider, If Apple lo…
Apple has quarter trillion dollars of cash on hand. Without calculating interest or expected value, at 100k a day, Apple could hold out for over a millennium. I'm sure Apple has a legal army gaming out each one of these scenarios.