Posted on 11/20/2014 12:57:41 AM PST by Swordmaker
“The No. 2 official at the Justice Department recently warned top Apple executives that stronger encryption protections added to iPhones would lead to a horrific tragedy, such as a child dying, because police couldn’t access a suspect’s device, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday,” Dan Goodin reports for Ars Technica.
“The beefed up protections, Apple recently disclosed, mean that even when company officials are served with a court order, they will be unable to retrieve potentially crucial evidence such as photos, messages, or contacts stored on iPhones and iPads,” Goodin reports. “Instead, the data can be accessed only by people who know the passcode that serves as the encryption key.”
“Prior to changes introduced in iOS 8, Apple had the means to pull data off of a locked phone, and according to the WSJ, the company helped police do just that when it was served with a valid court order. Under the latest iOS version, the data can be recovered only by knowing the passcode. Passcodes that are sufficiently long and complex make it infeasible for Apple or anyone else to crack,” Goodin reports. “US Attorney General Eric Holder recently said it was ‘worrisome’ that tech companies were adding default encryption to consumer electronics. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently pushed back at a WSJ conference, saying ‘”Look, if law enforcement wants something, they should go to the user and get it. It’s not for me to do that.’”
-PJ
Encryption causes global warming! Deforestation! Kills baby whales! Kills children! A puppy will die!
“Citizens, help us quarter soldiers. If you don’t do it, a child somewhere will die”
Fool me once, your fault. Fool me twice, my fault.
“You know what they say, live free or die.”
The problem is, not many people say that anymore.
When I saw the headline, my first thought was that the DOJ had started taking hostages.
the government, and Obama in particular, in failing to enforce immigration laws, HAS ALREADY resulted in a GOOD NUMBER of children dying...in drunk driving accidents.
Not to mention, of course, those far less valuable parents, police officers, and ordinary citizens being killed by other means (crime, driving without a license, etc.).
And, that isn’t even an equivalent situation.
One thing people should be aware of when using these iPhones. If they use their thumbprint to encrypt, then the government can force them to decrypt. A thumbprint is considered a “physical” key. However, if you encrypt with a password, the government can’t force you to divulge the password since that “requires a mental process” and therefore would be violating your 5th Amendment rights. Now if you must use a print, don’t use your thumb. Use a finger like a pinky. The government will assume you have used your thumb and try to decrypt with it. They will get an error. Thinking it is just how you placed your thumb , the will have you do it again. Do it 5 times and the iPhone locks itself out and the only way in is through a password which they can’t demand.
Propaganda spreading State spews propaganda.
If you honestly believe that the doj or nsa or any other entity that wants to do so can’t access that, you are deceiving yourself.
I’m good with that.
That only holds in one State Circuit Court Judge's jurisdiction in Virginia and Circuit Court Judge Steven Frucci's logic and legal theory have not been completely tested. He is a TRIAL JUDGE ruling on whether a defendant must be compelled to surrender his finger to unlock his iPhone or not. The Judge ruled he did. Therefore, his ruling does not rise to the level that establishes any legal precedent for any other court.
Judge Steve J. Frucci relies on his concept that a person's finger is analogous to the idea that the court can order the surrender of a physical object in the possession or control of a person, such as a key, to the court or the authorities. This flies in the face of the US Constitution which states:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The last time I checked, my finger was part of my person! Isn;t yours? How can he surrender his finger? It also flies in the face of the INTENT of locking his phone with a personal means. The method of how that phone is locked should not be lightly by-passed merely because the state wants to. If the state cannot compel him to surrender a number he keeps in his head, why can it force him against his will to surrender a number kept in one of his fingers? His intent was the same in both instances. . . and the intent is paramount in the law. Otherwise, "No Trespassing" signs and fencing would be worthless in having trespassers arrested.
He also ruled that taking of a freely available a fingerprint or a non-invasive DNA sample from an oral swab for or identity purposes was analogous. It is truly not because neither of those can be used to open the locked phone. IF a routine fingerprint reproduction COULD open the phone, the judge might have some logic on his side. In this case, it is much more analogous to the defendant standing mute, refusing to say or do anything. Requiring someone to unlock a safe with a combination is currently also unconstitutional. . . even though he knows it. . . even with a search warrant. Just because one judge has made such a ruling, does not make it universally true. Using your own finger against you can be construed as testifying against yourself. In addition, It STILL requires a search warrant. Merely turning OFF your iPhone or waiting forty-eight hours causes the iPhone to demand a passcode, not a fingerprint and will not work with just a fingerprint. . . which puts it back into the password protected status, violating the 5th Amendment.
In addition, any search warrant under our constitution must specify exactly WHAT the authorities are searching for and it does not allow fishing expeditions through volumes of data that are the equivalent of thousands of copies of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
"Somehow, (Circuit Court Judge Steven Frucci) let that fingerprint mean something it doesn’t. No one at this point is questioning the right of the police to force the people they book at the station to provide their fingerprints. But that situation has nothing in common with being forced to use your fingerprint to unlock your phone for the police. In the latter case, you’re not really providing your fingerprint; you’re providing your PIN, that “knowledge” that, were it a string of numbers, would be kept in your head instead of at the tip of your finger. Most privacy advocates would find appalling the idea of injecting a suspect with sodium pentothal — the so-called truth serum — to get a confession or, in this case, a password. It’s forcing a person to do something that he would never willingly consent to doing. How is that different from three police officers holding a suspect down and forcing his finger to be scanned by his iPhone?"— Source, Evan Schuman, Computerworld, "Are fingerprints PINs or physical artifacts?" 11/11/2014.
What i find is funny is that given the Glacial velocity of judicial motion in our country, I would be willing to bet that by the time Judge Frucci got through reading the various briefs and researching his erroneous decision, more than 48 hours had elapsed. . . and the iPhone in question had defaulted to requiring a passcode in any case! LOL!
They have. We are them.
(fill in the blank)
If the Federal government will not stay within its constitutional constraints, ___________________.
Since when do they care about children dying?
The official is no doubt correct, in the technical sense.
With tens or hundreds of millions of such devices in the wild, the law of large numbers says that eventually failure to be able to access the information will lead to a tragedy.
Another law, of course, says that it’s a bad idea to base policy on extraordinarily unlikely events.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons ... against unreasonable searches and seizures
There is no constitutional protection against reasonable searches and seizures. Nor should there be.
Which means the entire constitutional issue is over whether a particular search or seizure is reasonable.
BTW, I'm no tech expert, but I would assume there is a way to fake up a thumbprint sufficiently accurately to fool an iPhone. If you have the person's fingerprints, which obviously they do.
Also not entirely accurate.
You are correct the authorities are required to specify exactly what they are looking for. But, as when searching a house, they have to inspect the whole thing to make sure what they are looking for is there. They aren't required to ignore plain evidence of criminality of type B they run across while looking for evidence of criminal behavior A.
IOW, if the cops are searching a house for meth and find $10,000 in counterfeit bills, that evidence can be used to try him for counterfeiting. Similarly, if they're looking thru the phone for evidence of drug dealing and find child porn, that can be used against him.
And, yes, the cops play games with this all the time and everybody knows it. They always have.
OH MY GAWD! HAHAHAHAH This Chestnut again. LOL! The USB vulnerability applies to anything that connects via USB and is so low level in the USB standard it will probably never be fixed.
You DO know that Zdziarski is so out of date with his idiotic claims from 2007 that he has been literally laughed out of security conferences on iOS, don't you. His so called vulnerability requires iPhones and iPads to have been initially paired with a computer through USB. The fact is that the VAST majority of iPhones have NEVER been paired through USB. . . Everything today is done wirelessly. That vulnerability was closed in 2009. The WIFI signals and the USB connection pairing are totally different connections. . . they are not shared on iOS.
Then the idiot claims that with the pairing keys a hacker can steal data from iPhones and iPads because the iOS devices will think they are connected to a trusted computer, but that is ignoring that the data on the devices is at LEAST 128 bit encrypted, entangled with the UUID of he device and the user's ID, and only the current data the user is accessing is unencrypted while he is using it. If the hacker does not have the user's ID and Passcode, he's not going to get anywhere. IF somehow the hacker succeeded in getting the pairing data from an original USB hookup, then KNEW where you'd be, and then got on the same WIFI network with that pairing data. . . WOW, what a lot of work to get a whole lot of basically nothing. The so-called hacker would not get much. He postulates that because the NSA has a huge budget, they could probably get all that. If they could get all that, they have access to your home computer already!
"Its sole purposes is to dish out data, bypass backup encryption, and give you almost the same amount of personal data you get from a backup on the phone, in some cases even more. We really need someone at Apple to step up and explain why this is here. There's no logical reason why it should be there on 600 million devices," points out Zdziarski.What Zdziarski found, as was pointed out by NUMEROUS developers, and Apple Support, after this three day wonder story broke, were the system library files for BACKING UP the iPhone data and settings if you do hook up by USB. Which can only be invoked by the user from the iPhone or from iTunes. He totally mis-interpreted what he found! He is an IDIOT! Are you seriously trusting someone who calls himself "NerveGas?" Really? We had a FreeRepublic thread on this back in July.
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