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U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

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Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#231

Post by roywiggins »

aaronharnly wrote: post #215
syshax wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We could revoke the 13th and 14th Amendments and have slavery again--there is no legal impediment to that. Actually, I think this is the genius of the amendment system. You are correct that it could happen. But unlike laws that can be passed or revoked by Congress by political whim, the barrier to creating or overturning Constitutional amendments is much higher and more difficult to pass.

There's a famous story about the logician Kurt Gödel related to this.[1] In preparation for the US citizenship test, despite assurances from his friends Albert Einstein and Oskar Morgenstern that the test was a mere formality, he studied assiduously all sorts of details about local and national government, including the US Constitution. He quite excitedly told Einstein and Morgenstern that he had found a weakness in…

The Constitution is pretty much only as strong as the institutions that interpret and enforce it. It's all sort of a collective hallucination that the Constitution has any power in and of itself. "Godelian" defects seem a lot less dangerous to me than plain-old human factors.

The UK manages to be a Parliamentary democracy without having a single coherent constitution at all, let alone one free of logical defects- so having a perfectly consistent and "loophole-free" constitution doesn't seem particularly important in practice.

The easiest way to wholly undermine the US Constitution is to just expand the Supreme Court bench and then pack it with your cronies, who will then let you do whatever you want and call it constitutional. No amendment needed!

Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#232

Post by jameshart »

So in the last week, a lot of media reports around the Brussels attacks have focused on how, in the immediate aftermath of the arrest of an alleged Paris conspirator, the Belgian authorities were premature in announcing that they were learning information about his co-conspirators, which caused those people to bring forward their attack plans.

Now, the FBI has just announced to the world that any information locked up in the San Bernardino iPhone is now in their hands. Presumably any co-conspirators who thought their contact details might be in that phone are now aware of that.

Now, on the other hand, for the past month or so, the FBI has on the contrary been doing a very good job of informing the world, with to some extent Apple's help, that they did not have access to the information in that phone. That may have served to reassure those same conspirators that the FBI was not onto them.. When perhaps they had actually cracked the phone some time ago, and were in fact in the process of employing that intelligence.

Too charitable to suspect the FBI of having pulled that off?

Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#233

Post by LordKano »

panarky wrote: post #115
snowwrestler wrote: post #101

I'm seeing a lot of comments to the effect that the government will just try again at some point. Well, welcome to life in a democracy. Nothing is ever settled with finality because there are plenty of ways for future generations to change the laws we cherish today--for good or ill. We could revoke the 13th and 14th Amendments and have slavery again--there is no legal impediment to that. That we don't do that is a re…

> Well, welcome to life in a democracy. The problem is not that things change in a democracy. The problem is that the change we get does not represent the will of the people. A majority of Americans is dissatisfied with the Patriot Act [1] yet it keeps getting renewed. A majority of Americans thinks political spending is corrupt [2] and that the political system is rigged, yet we get Citizens United to pour even more…

A majority of Americans voted for the Democrat in 2000, but the Republican was installed instead

That's a feature, not a bug.

The Electoral College was specifically designed to mitigate the power of densely populated areas.

Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#234

Post by karmacondon »

So what happens to the other 200+ iphones that law enforcement needed opened?

It seems like there are at least certain iphones that can be opened using this method and similar hardware based approaches. Are the feds going to move forward with that? It seems like accessing this particular phone wasn't trivial or cheap. So I'd imagine that it will come down to whether or not it's "worth" the cost of flashing individual chips for each of the other devices.

And what happens if there is potentially exonerating evidence on one of those phones? Does the defense team have to come up with the money to pay for a lab or outside company to open the phone? And also, is an encrypted phone going to be the new 'dna evidence'? Like, will a brand new iphone that's linked to a major crime be held away for years until the security community can hack it, potentially setting people free or sending them to jail?

Sorry for all the interrogatives. Even though this particular case has been settled, there are still a lot of questions surrounding default device level encryption.

Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#235

Post by LordKano »

mchahn wrote: post #212
noelsusman wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The American government is not supposed to be a direct representation of the will of the people, but let's go through this anyway. On the PATRIOT Act, the link you provided shows that 63% of Americans either want to keep the entire thing or make minor changes. Citizens United came from the Supreme Court, an institution that is explicitly designed to be shielded from the will of the people as much as possible. The 200…

> Citizens United came from the Supreme Court, an institution that is explicitly designed to be shielded from the will of the people as much as possible. The people have nothing to do with that decision. It is just plain unconstitutional. The framers of the constitution never meant for personal rights to be applied to corporations.

The framers never intended for individuals to give up their rights just because they form corporations.

I have the right to freedom of speech. You have the right to freedom of speech(assuming that you're an American citizen).

If you and I form a partnership with the express purpose of working together to combine our voices and speak together, we retain that right to freedom of speech.

That was what Citizens United held.

Beyond that, you're just plain wrong. Corporations are legal persons. Only persons can be parties to legal actions. If your neighbor's dog escapes and bites you, can you sue the dog? Of course not. You sue the neighbor, the person responsible. If your neighbor kills your dog, can your dog's puppies sue your neighbor? Of course not. Again, non-persons cannot be party to legal actions. A corporation can own property, pay taxes, sue, be sued and as a legal person, corporations have rights. They don't have all of the same rights as people, that's why I find it so frustrating when people conflate "people" with "persons". Legally, they are different concepts.

Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#236

Post by mcphage »

downandout wrote: post #96
mcphage wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but they didn't actually accomplish any of their real goals—making it easy to force Apple to break their security. This particular phone is immaterial, and Apple can always talk big later about how they patched any of the security holes that the government used, to recover face.

>Maybe, but they didn't actually accomplish any of their real goals—making it easy to force Apple to break their security Unless one of their real goals was to get the conversation going about creating new laws that would make uncrackable products illegal, without actually testing the limits of existing laws. Because that is what they achieved. > This particular phone is immaterial, and Apple can always talk big late…

> Unless one of their real goals was to get the conversation going [...] Because that is what they achieved.

I suppose, but the conversation definitely wasn't moving in their direction. More like they beat a hasty retreat.

> Most will hear nothing other than "the feds can now crack iPhones"

I assume that most people already believe that they can crack iPhones. And it's not like they came out of this process looking good; they created a huge media circus about how they needed Apple to unlock the phone, beating their chests, only to come back with "uh... well, I guess we didn't need to do any of this at all".

Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#237

Post by PhasmaFelis »

panarky wrote: post #115
snowwrestler wrote: post #101

I'm seeing a lot of comments to the effect that the government will just try again at some point. Well, welcome to life in a democracy. Nothing is ever settled with finality because there are plenty of ways for future generations to change the laws we cherish today--for good or ill. We could revoke the 13th and 14th Amendments and have slavery again--there is no legal impediment to that. That we don't do that is a re…

> Well, welcome to life in a democracy. The problem is not that things change in a democracy. The problem is that the change we get does not represent the will of the people. A majority of Americans is dissatisfied with the Patriot Act [1] yet it keeps getting renewed. A majority of Americans thinks political spending is corrupt [2] and that the political system is rigged, yet we get Citizens United to pour even more…

All of those things are real problems. But it sounds like you're looking for an excuse to throw up your hands and give up. That's not going to make things any better.

Sometimes the will of the people prevails, and sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't, it's really disheartening; sometimes all our effort is for naught. But if we don't even try, it will always be for naught.

Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#238

Post by eru »

studentrob wrote: post #190
rayiner wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your examples are all pretty disingenuous. > A majority of Americans is dissatisfied with the Patriot Act [1] yet it keeps getting renewed. First, what polls say is not the same as what the electorate believes. Actual voters skew older and more conservative that the general public. Second, your poll doesn't show that Americans are dissatisfied with the Patriot Act. 63% of those polled think it requires no or only min…

> Frankly, I think we should not only abolish the electoral college, but the states as well. I was with you until this part. States gave us a path to gay marriage, and allow people to move to different areas that hold different values than the whole nation. I'd suggest trying instant runoff voting before moving to something as drastic as abolishing states. I think IRV would allow people to express their votes and opi…

Approval Voting is much simpler, and without the perverse incentives that come with instant runoff voting.

Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#239

Post by drallison »

So, the US DOJ has in hand an exploit which allows them to access protected data on an iPhone, access that Apple and the phone's designers clearly did not intend to be allowed. Ethical behavior would have the US DOJ describe the exploit to Apple immediately so that the flaw in the system can be repaired. Publishing the exploit in publicly available documents would speed Apple's efforts to repair the fault.

Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#240

Post by lowpro »

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #217
fsck--off wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the 2000 election a disingenuous example? Bush lost the overall popular vote and it is almost certain that a majority of people tried to vote for Gore in Florida.

An electoral college winner losing the overall popular vote has happened much more than once. Florida was more or less a coin flip that landed on its edge and stayed that way.

It's happened four times, of which the first went to the House to decide, and the 1876 and 1888 were in a time of widespread corruption, but nonetheless it's still very rare, especially in the modern day, and I wouldn't expect it to happen again in our lifetimes.
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