I wonder which security group helped the FBI. There must be another whole world of, government friendly, security researchers I don't hear about.
U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone
81–90 of 381 posts
Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone
#82The FBIs motives have always been nakedly transparent in this case. They had no interest in the specific phone, they wanted to use it as a wedge issue to force a precedent. Once they figured out this avenue was a bust, they withdrew to find a different angle. Since everything is classified anyway, it's irrelevant if they actually cracked the phone or not but if they did, it was probably by buying an exploit from the NSA TAO store [1].
Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone
#83I feel like cases shouldn't be droppable unless both parties mutually agree, and the courts also must first agree.the courts should not agree if it's a case that could set a precedent that can have far reaching implications. What if next time, a smaller player than Apple was caught in this sort of case, and they can't fight back as easily? Then it'd be easier to setup a precedent favourable to one party. This seems l…
We will see a parade of similar cases until the government wins and sets the precedent.
Witness the relentless series of attacks from SOPA, PIPA, NDAA, ACTA, CISPA, TPP, etc.
Losing only delays the inevitable because they can just play again, time after time.
Eventually they'll win one and that's all it takes, game over.
Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone
#84This is possibly the worst outcome. The tide of public opinion was turning towards Apple and privacy, and away from the FBI; for it to enter the court under this pretence there was a strong argument to be made against the latter. With this announcement, for the many, this matter will now be "resolved". When it inevitably rears its ugly head again, the same pretence may no longer be true.
I think I know what you mean but don't forget there is a specific and horrible case here too. Many people died and now the FBI has access to the phone. I don't know what the odds are that they will find anything useful in way of easing the pain of the victims or preventing an occurrence, but certainly it seems highly plausible. And at the very least a lot of resources going into this part of the investigation can now be used elsewhere. They were able to access the phone and (hopefully) it required some expensive physical+software breaks, which seems to be a reasonable compromise in the privacy vs security debate.
I think this is a great outcome.
Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone
#85I suspect they didn't actually crack it. I think it's likely that they just realized the losing battle they were fighting. It sounded like a lot of public sentiment was against the FBI and they were unlikely to win the case (and it seemed like the information wasn't vital to them anyway) so they just gave an excuse to drop the case. This has an additional benefit: rather than having the "boundaries" here be defined b…
I'm not sure about public sentiment - have you seen polls about it? My take is that HN crowd is completely unrepresentative vis-a-vis the opinion of majority on this issue.
You may be right; I have not. I had read that most of the big companies like Facebook and Microsoft, at least, were against the FBI on this issue so that is more of what I meant by "public" sentiment, although now thinking about it, that means I've made a much less compelling argument.
Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone
#86I feel like cases shouldn't be droppable unless both parties mutually agree, and the courts also must first agree.the courts should not agree if it's a case that could set a precedent that can have far reaching implications. What if next time, a smaller player than Apple was caught in this sort of case, and they can't fight back as easily? Then it'd be easier to setup a precedent favourable to one party. This seems l…
One of the reasons that courts do not allow cases to continue when a party loses interest in the dispute (for whatever reason) is that the court can no longer trust that party to continue making a forceful case. You can end up with situations where the party refuses to spend money on making good arguments and finding evidence, then make very bad precedent because of it.
Yes, absolutely - and another reason is that it forms a sort of "de facto precedent". Even though there isn't a USSC judgment, in future people will (hopefully) refer to "the time the DoJ tried to do X" and the theory is this is citation enough.
Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone
#87I wish Apple would be able to recoup their legal costs from the DoJ -- the government shouldn't be allowed to force a company to spend money on defending their rights (using our "unlimited" tax dollars to do so), only to drop the case at the last minute making the entire case moot. Apple should be able to recover their legal costs.
Somewhat agree, but Apple DID have a court order they were fighting. They did choose to fight this legally adjudicated and issued order. The owner of the phone and the law enforcement both wanted the phone decrypted. FWIW, I agree that privacy is ignored and should be respected, but apple chose this fight. I'm glad they did, but they knew it would cost them.
And the DoJ stopped fighting.
If the DoJ ultimately won the case, then it's fair that Apple should have to pay their legal costs.
But since using a 200 year old law to force Apple to do work they don't want to do was a legal stretch, if the DoJ lost the case then again I'd say the DoJ should pay Apple's legal costs.
Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone
#88I wonder what the government's obligation is to Apple, to let them know the nature of the vulnerability.
I'm sure Apple already knows how they are doing it.
The tech that FBI is claiming to have cracked is the iPhone 5C which does not have the Secure Enclave hardware that all later iPhones do and which are far more of an actual challenge to crack.
Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone
#89You could say they dropped it because they accessed the phone. You might also say they dropped it because going to court and losing would greatly narrow the scope of the All Writs act. Then the "maybe illegal" spying coersion becomes "actually illegal"
It'll be easy enough to infer which it is later because if they have actually got data out of the phone then they'll amend the complaint against the co-conspirator(s) with the newly available information.
Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone
#90Can Apple counter sue for them to reveal how they accessed the phone? Surely, there must be a loophole in there somehow...
Nope. The government does not have to disclose investigative techniques. If Apple wanted to help the government, they could have, but they chose not to take that tact. Expecting the government to help Apple now is folly.
What about Cellebrite thus www.cellebrite.com. This article seems to suggest it is them - http://gizmodo.com/the-company-helping-unlock-the-san-bernar...