Signaling Post-Snowden Era, New iPhone Locks Out N.S.A • Hacker News Board

Re: Signaling Post-Snowden Era, New iPhone Locks Out N.S.A

#81

Post by tzs » Sat, Sep 27, 2014, 6:28 PM UTC

praptak wrote: post #4

Well dudes, you screwed it up for yourselves with illegal wiretapping, the perhaps legal but still outrageous secret court orders and the attitude you presented when all this came to light. Fuck you.

How would you design a law enforcement system that could work without secret court orders? If court orders were all issued by open courts, then any non-idiotic criminal organization would have someone in attendance at all relevant hearings to alert them when the court issues an order that affects them, such as a warrant authorizing a wiretap.

Re: Signaling Post-Snowden Era, New iPhone Locks Out N.S.A

#82

Post by dobbsbob » Sat, Sep 27, 2014, 6:51 PM UTC

droptableusers wrote: post #73

You would have to be very gullible to believe this show, I would not be surprised if this is done in cooperation with the government. They want you to use propitiatory software and own personal surveillance devices such as phones and Apple wants to sell your their product. They both would win from such a scenario. I do not buy it, the least I can do for Snowden is to be very skeptical.

Police did the same dance with BlackBerry, they claimed to the media it was impossible for them to spy on calls and texts but we all know now that was a ruse to encourage criminals to use them. UK riots they had no problems handing over decrypted messages to the police. The Datalocking company, who ran their own BB Enterprise servers and peddled "unbreakable encryption" were remotely accessed by the FBI and keys pulled, with the help of Blackberry themselves of course. Any customs agent in the western world can plug a locked BB into a little device they have that unlocks the screen immediately. Finspy/mobile malware let's the police monitor communications in real time too (and iOS).

Samsung Android phones the proprietary modem can r,w /sdcard and /data unless you either install Replicant or use some kind of permission controls like SEAndroid to lock out modem.img access to everything. Apple likely has a similar proprietary baseband with full remote control over the whole application OS they can offer the FBI to quietly activate targeted spying.

Re: Signaling Post-Snowden Era, New iPhone Locks Out N.S.A

#83

Post by tombrossman » Sat, Sep 27, 2014, 7:15 PM UTC

mhurron wrote: post #63

kaffeinecoma wrote: post #48

The new security in iOS 8 protects information stored on the device itself, but not data stored on iCloud, Apple’s cloud service. So Apple will still be able to obtain some customer information stored on iCloud in response to government requests. Some? I think the importance of this qualification has been overlooked everywhere it's been reported.

It has been reported everywhere I've seen it. It's pretty clear that it means Apple will be able to give information that you have let them give by storing it on iCloud.

The message seems to be that Apple are 'locking out the NSA' which is nonsense of course, but both may be counting on the fact that a typical consumer won't really look too closely at the claim. Their takeaway is that Apple's phones are perceived to be safer.

Apple gets to sell more phones due to this perception, the FBI get to continue hoovering (no pun intended) up iPhone user's data, and everyone goes home happy. It seems to be a manufactured controversy, with Apple & the FBI both playing their parts and knowing full well the rules of the game haven't changed one bit.

Re: Signaling Post-Snowden Era, New iPhone Locks Out N.S.A

#84

Post by scottlocklin » Sat, Sep 27, 2014, 7:26 PM UTC

hahainternet wrote: post #41

krija wrote: post #9

This makes me extraordinarily happy, perhaps this is the first major step in the struggle against government spying on innocent citizens? On another note, is anyone disturbed by how even the idea of people being able to store their private data securely being seen as inherently criminal by high level officials? What does that say about these people in power, they literally view your right to privacy as dangerous. Sic…

> What does that say about these people in power, they literally view your right to privacy as dangerous. Sickening Your right to privacy is dangerous. Imagine trying to investigate a murder with unlimited privacy. Unless someone saw the killer kill, you've no chance.

Man, how did the government investigate murders before universal surveillance? Obviously if they can't spy on our cell phones, the murder rate will increase dramatically!

Re: Signaling Post-Snowden Era, New iPhone Locks Out N.S.A

#85

Post by kordless » Sat, Sep 27, 2014, 7:36 PM UTC

> Mr. Comey said, “What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to hold themselves beyond the law.”

This is a huge blanket blaming statement. Our intent can be protecting someone's privacy without ever addressing their intent to do harm to another. And, given the propensity of people who don't wish harm on others, I'm totally OK in supporting and pushing for these types of protections in consumer goods.

If anyone has tried to go beyond the law here, it's the NSA.

Re: Signaling Post-Snowden Era, New iPhone Locks Out N.S.A

#86

Post by wcoenen » Sat, Sep 27, 2014, 7:57 PM UTC

PeterBarrett wrote: post #7

A 6 letter alphanumeric password, do they think people use old laptops to generate the possible passwords?! It should be at least 128 or 256 if they're being serious about security and preferably much much longer than that.

128 bits of entropy should suffice to make brute forcing impossible.

That corresponds to a 22 character mixed-case alphanumeric password. (62 choices per character, 62^22 > 2^128). But only if the characters are chosen randomly by a password generator; characters chosen by a human will have patterns and therefore lower entropy.

80 bits of entropy should still be enough to occupy a large amount of specialized hardware for a long time. That would correspond to 14 characters.

Re: Signaling Post-Snowden Era, New iPhone Locks Out N.S.A

#87

Post by atlantic » Sat, Sep 27, 2014, 9:29 PM UTC

hahainternet wrote: post #37

silentOpen wrote: post #19

FTA: At a news conference on Thursday devoted largely to combating terror threats from the Islamic State, Mr. Comey said, “What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to hold themselves beyond the law.” The state and the law are separate entities, Mr. Comey. It concerns me that, in your mind, you have conflated the power of the state with the normativity of the law. In the t…

> The state and its avatars must recognize that it cannot and must not have the ability to exercise absolute power over citizen's thoughts, computations, and communications if it wishes to foster a healthy and free society This sounds lovely, except it's just absolute nonsense. For many thousands of years states have maintained the power to restrict citizens communications and almost since the invention of the telegr…

Who said anything about unlimited freedom? Keeping a few secrets from the state, namely the contents of your mobile phone, is a very limited and modest freedom, and one worth defending. And having that extra bit of privacy is hardly going to unleash the forces of anarchy and chaos.

Re: Signaling Post-Snowden Era, New iPhone Locks Out N.S.A

#88

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Sep 27, 2014, 11:22 PM UTC

csandreasen wrote: post #40

adam12 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like he/she is referring the the investigators who are saying that the only way to unlock the phones is to beat the hell out of the person who knows the password.

He said beat the hell out of the locker , not the person. In this case I'd interpret his analogy to be a reference to brute force decryption.

[deleted]

Re: Signaling Post-Snowden Era, New iPhone Locks Out N.S.A

#89

Post by Zigurd » Sun, Sep 28, 2014, 2:35 AM UTC

csandreasen wrote: post #67

Zigurd wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at all the links on this thread to the moral panic various cops have been goaded into spewing, it's not like they aren't doing their part to make Apple's point.

The cops have a point. I don't think the actual encryption is as big a deal now as people are making it out to be, but Apple is setting a precedent when they say "we're doing this so we don't have to comply with warrants" instead of saying "we're doing this to make our customers safer". Apple just sparked a debate (as much as I hate that term). If the cops don't make a stink out of it now and point out the necessity…

A few things about that:

1. Warrants have never been a guarantee of a search producing evidence.

2. It isn't Apple's data to hand over when a warrant is presented.

3. Making strong and deniable encryption illegal for some classes of users will make it highly desirable contraband.

4. Producing cyphertext complies with a warrant if that is all you can access.

Re: Signaling Post-Snowden Era, New iPhone Locks Out N.S.A

#90

Post by dTal » Sun, Sep 28, 2014, 2:44 PM UTC

XorNot wrote: post #69

rohansingh wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hilarious part about all this is that companies do market and sell closets that cannot be forcibly opened. This product is commonly known as a safe.

If you think a safe can't be opened by...practically any law enforcement agency quickly, then I don't know what to tell you. I could talk about safe-cracking as an art, but I'd direct you to go look up a YouTube video a plasma cutter going through steel. The reality is most safes you buy commercially can be broken in under 30 minutes by an experience locksmith without such tools.

Safecracking aside, I imagine trying to forcibly compromise a decent safe stands a decent chance of killing a child locked inside, particularly if you reach straight for your plasma cutter.