The FBI holds an iPhone that was owned by one of the San Bernardino terrorists, Syed Rizwan Farook, and wants Apple to crack it. Apple CEO Tim Cook is defying the FBI request and the court order that accompanied it, saying that cracking the phone would require developing a special version of iOS that could bypass passcode encryption. If such a genetically modified mobile OS escaped into the wild it could be used by anyone to crack any current iPhone, which would be bad for Apple’s users and bad for Amurica, Cook says. So he won’t do it, dag nabbit.
That’s the big picture story dominating the tech news this week. However compelling, I’m pretty sure it’s wrong. Apple isn’t defying the FBI. Or at least Apple isn’t defying the Department of Justice, of which the FBI is supposed to be a part. I believe Apple is actually working with the DoJ, which doesn’t really want to compel Apple to do anything except play a dramatic and very political role.
Now for some more details. In order to get their court order the FBI had to tell the judge that its own lab couldn’t crack the phone. Or maybe they said their lab didn’t crack the phone. Nobody knows. But the first question any cynic with technical bones would ask is, “Can’t the CIA/NSA/Steve Gibson, somebody crack that darned iPhone?”
John McAfee, who is one of my absolute favorite kooks of all time says he can do it, no problem, in about a month. McAfee says the FBI is just cheap and unwilling to drop big bucks on the right bad guys to make it happen, which kinda suggests that iPhones have been broken-into before, doesn’t it?
One important point: I know John McAfee and if he says he can do it, he can do it.
There’s something that doesn’t smell right here. The passage of time, the characters involved, the urgency of anti-terrorism make me strongly suspect that the innards of that iPhone are already well known to the Feds. If I were to do it I wouldn’t try cracking the phone at all, but its backup on a Mac or PC or iCloud, so maybe that’s the loophole they are using. Maybe they didn’t crack the iPhone because they didn’t have to. Or maybe some third party has already cracked it, leaving the FBI with that old standby plausible deniability.
Let’s drop for a moment the technical arguments and look at the legal side. If you read Fortune on this issue it looks like Apple will probably prevail. The legal basis for compelling Apple to invent a key for a lock that’s not supposed to even exist is flimsy. This does not mean that the FBI couldn’t prevail in some courts (after all, they convinced the judge who issued the original order). But it’s really a legal tossup who wins at this point, or appears to be. Remember, though, that when it comes to lawyers Apple can probably afford better help than can the U.S. Government.
So Apple’s being seen as an unpatriotic pariah with Silicon Valley companies like Facebook and Twitter only in the last few hours finally starting to support Cupertino.
Before I tell you what I think is actually happening here let me add one more piece of data. At the same time the FBI is pushing for unprecedented power to force decryption of devices, another news item appeared this week: Columbia University computer scientist Steve Bellovin has been appointed the first technology scholar for the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board — the outfit that oversees these very activities at federal agencies including the NSA, CIA and, yes, the FBI. Up to this point the Board has never had as a voting member someone who actually understands this stuff in real depth. And professor Bellovin does much more than just understand this technology, he’s publicly opposed to it as co-author of a seminal report, Keys Under Doormats: Mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all data and communications. The report, which was published last July by MIT, clearly takes the position that the the FBI is wrong in its position against Apple. Not legally wrong — this isn’t a legal document — but wrong in terms of proper policy. Just as the Clipper Chip was a bad idea when I wrote about it right here almost 20 years ago, this forced hacking of iPhones is a bad idea, too, or so claims Bellovin.
Would Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or even Jeb Bush have appointed Bellovin to that board? I don’t think so.
So wait a minute. There’s a plenty of reason to believe that Apple complying with the FBI order is bad policy, it’s legally shaky, and at least one of the people who makes the strongest arguments in this direction is now voting on a secret government board? What the heck is going on here?
What’s going on is Justice Antonin Scalia is dead.
Had Justice Scalia not died unexpectedly a few days ago (notably before the Apple/FBI dustup) and had the FBI pursued the case with it landing finally in the Supreme Court, well the FBI would have probably won the case 5-4. Maybe not, but probably.
With Justice Scalia dead and any possible replacement locked in a Republican-induced coma, the now eight-member Supreme Court has nominally four liberal and four conservative justices but at least 1.5 of those conservatives (Justice Kennedy and sometimes Chief Justice Roberts) have been known to turn moderate on certain decisions. This smaller court, which will apparently judge all cases for the next couple years, is likely to be more moderate than the Scalia Court ever was.
So if you are a President who is a lawyer and former teacher of constitutional law and you’ve come over time to see that this idea of secret backdoors into encrypted devices is not really a good idea, but one that’s going to come up again and again pushed by nearly everyone from the other political party (and even a few from your own) wouldn’t right now be the best of all possible times to kinda-sorta fight this fight all the way to the Supreme Court and lose?
If it doesn’t go all the way to the Supremes, there’s no chance to set a strong legal precedent and this issue will come back again and again and again.
That’s what I am pretty sure is happening.
My understanding is that the FBI simply wants a version of iOS ( signed by Apple to which the target phone will be upgraded) that allows unlimited attempts to guess the password. A 4 digit password ( rumored to be the case here ) is broken by brute force with at most 10,000 attempts. I think they’ve also asked for an easy way to make those attempts but I’ve seen at least one HackADay project with a robot finger to do the pressing for just this type of case. So a slow 4s a try is at most 11 hours to crack.
–
Your theory has me thinking though.. that yes, even if the FBI already possesses the ability to decrypt the phone this might be a great time to build support for the FBI vs encryption. Or as you suggest.. with Scalia gone maybe to strengthen encryption?
I was first to reply last night.. otherwise I wouldn’t have fussed about the spam filter knocking my message and attempted recovery off. My comment above has only just become visible now at 1pm pacific in case any of you are wondering why I’ve been ignored 😉
Hi Bob,
I thought you were being (1) somewhat too trusting and (2) naive regarding how Apple has done their encryption, when you said that you believed McAfee.
Now look what’s happened (McAfee has said that he lied for the publicity!)
But not about being able to crack the iPhone. Read the whole article, and the direct quote, not just the headline.
Bob doesn’t mention this, but Apple gave the FBI virtual copies of the suspect iPhone the FBI can attempt to crack without damaging the data on the original iPhone. The concern is that the original phone might erase itself or render the data unreadable.
Since the FBI has virtual copies, they can attempt to crack a virtual iPhone with at least four tries. The iPhone uses a four digit PIN. There’s 10,000 possible combinations. It seems to me you could script a program to create 10,000 iPhone copies and try each one with a password starting at 0 and ending at 9999. It should take a day.
So yes, I feel there has to be some other reason the FBI is unwilling to try this. There must be a reason they are publicly admitting they are too incompetent to crack an iPhone. Seriously, why would they attempt to look like incompetent fools?
“Apple gave the FBI virtual copies of the suspect iPhone”?
.
[citation needed]
The phone is encrypted with a key unique to each device that Apple does not have access to. If Apple has a backdoor in that process in order to clone a device, then that would be a big breach of trust in their encryption system and that sort of news would be huge. That hasn’t been reported on so I seriously doubt that “Apple gave the FBI virtual copies of the suspect iPhone”. It’s definitely possible, but there’s no confirmation of that happening.
Instead, the FBI wants Apple to create a custom firmware that disables the software wipe function. Only Apple can put this on the phone this due to the device only running signed firmware.
Okay so that is not the way this works. The encryption key is stored in a tamper resistant , isolated region of the SoC powering the iPhone called the Secure Enclave. Think of it as TPM for embedded systems. The Access code grants the hardware access to the encryption key. The virtual copies of the device storage if they exist and it is plausible that they do lack the contents of this chip so cracking the copies is not a matter of trying 10,000 combinations but rather brute forcing AES-256.
https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf see pages 5 and 10.
(facepalm) the iPhone 5c in this case does not have a Secure Enclave…
Secure Enclave is a coprocessor which communicates across the memory bus with the main processor. Earlier chips still have an unreadable hardware id and hardware implemented crypto primitives that make use of this unreadable data. Instead of communicating on the memory bus these hardware functions have access to the register file. The hardware details may be blurred but functionally the difference is minimal. Instead of one properly signed firmware Apple would have to provide two on a newer phone. The point though is still valid: One can not try decrypting the image of the encrypted device storage which Apple may have provided to the FBI in a simulator.
Why is it that the FBI cannot open the IPhone and read the encrypted data?
How is the secure enclave secure from a screwdriver?
Highly doubtful that there are only 10,000 combinations. Unless they were exceedingly “uncareful” they probably changed the code to a longer alphanumeric code rather than the lazy 4 digit code.
No, the encryption key encrypting the data is huge. It might be 256 bit AES. The pin is used to descramble that key. The key never leaves the hardware, and there may be a 10 attempt limit to guess the pin. They want to remove the limit so they can try all pin codes, because the pin count is vastly smaller than the number of possible encryption keys. But it sounds like some bozo may have already tried the pin 10 times and the key already erased.
There are at least half a dozen significant hot takes out in the blogosphere on how this case “isn’t about what you think it is.”
.
By the time this case is resolved it’ll be years from now, and any possible actionable intel the FBI could conceivably get out of that iPhone from one of the San Bernardino shooters will be as cold and dead as Antonin Scalia.
.
So of course what this case is *really* about is going to be a lot more than that. It’s also pretty clear to me that it’s about quite a number of different things, all at once.
.
What it’s “really” about, in the end, is many of them, and it won’t even matter if there was some secret agenda behind it on the part of the FBI, Justice Department, Obama, etc. etc.
Yeah I pretty much thought the same from the start. This whole encryption debate has been building for ages. Even some States are starting to develop their own laws, and others are trying to make other laws stopping them.
Get a test case, go as hard as you can, get it to the Supreme Court, and silently hope the judges see right thing to do.
I don’t believe in Bob’s conspiracy theory. It’s too far-fetched and could too easily backfire.
But it’s certainly true that this is not about a particular phone. I think the FBI has carefully picked it as a test case because they know they can get public support over San Bernardino.
The larger issue is about having the power to order companies to create backdoors.
Yes, this is a test case.
People have already forgotten that the two terrorists used BURNER phones that they destroyed ( or attempted to ).
Of course, there is this: “https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-19/secret-memo-details-u-s-s-broader-strategy-to-crack-phones”
Your comment about Justice Scalia is one that would likely be disagreed with by most lawyers. I think he likely would have come out the way Magistrate Judge Orenstein did.
Scalia is primarily a libertarian, albeit IMPHO one about the “Just Us” banner. but he has stood up in cases to preserve citizen rights on searches and seizures. he would probably have written a “on this hand, on that hand” argument that ended up denying the action without slamming the door.
What if this whole show is simply sophisticated marketing to convince the bad guys that the iPhone is safe so they will use it for all their nefarious communications … but behind the scenes it’s already been cracked and all their dodgy data is (being) stored in plain text on some NSA server.
Well, that’s even more far fetched than the hare-brained nonsense that Cringely writes.
–
If the NSA could do anything useful with their mountains of data, they would have actually stopped a terrorist or two. Since they have not had any effectiveness, it can be assumed they cannot even analyze clear text data or encrypted voice. There is simply too much data, too many potential enemies, and no good ways of zeroing into what is relevant.
–
US intelligence has a reputation of invincibility, largely from the movies. In reality, it’s Barney Fife meets the three stooges.
“If the NSA could do anything useful with their mountains of data, they would have actually stopped a terrorist or two.”
What makes you think they haven’t? Just because they didn’t tell you about it, doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.
That’s because the NSA could use all the good press it can get right now, as the discussion about what the NSA can or can’t do has been co-opted by their seeming interest in passing around pics and videos they’ve picked up from other people’s data. (John Oliver’s reference to the NSA passing around pictures of your junk because it’s built into the culture there.)
.
The humor aside, the NSA does have tons and tons of data, and trying to sift through that is a royal pain. It costs a lot of money, time, and personnel, and –I presume– they don’t outsource that work to a “low cost center”, so it means that data sifting costs top dollar. So any shortcuts that the NSA can do, while also attempting to look “patriotic” while doing so, are a win-win for the NSA itself.
Funny you say that. Call it an opportunity.
Anyone who thinks your idea about free advertising is far fetched is shortsighted. Why? Cybersecurity is a forefront concern. (Ref:OPM breaches). Secure devices, OSs, these are highly marketable.
Guess what I think may be the challenge at the August DefCon in Vegas this year might be? LOL. Apple may just get more attention… Again..
Let’s look at options:
1. It’s technically possible to decrypt those data with a “simple”™ decryption process.
2. It’s technically possible to decrypt those data with a “bruteforce”™ decryption process.
3. It’s technically impossible to decrypt those data.
Whatever the option is, Apple knows it, the FBI knows it and that it’s just a theatrical comedy being performed on the media for the sake of marketing and national security, depending upon the party you’re standing for.
If it’s #1, then the privacy claims by Apple are trivially false. Apple gets slapped on the face and looses on the marketing area. It’ll recover in a year or two as people forgets easily.
If it’s #2, then Apple is safe and announces it will rework the encryption to make it harder by a factor 10 or 100. It’s a system update away.
Option #3 would be the scariest one for FBI and likely the least possible: Apple needs access to user data, just like Google.
Anyway, the final OFFICIAL result could be that the decryption cannot be done.
Unofficially it’s a different story everyone can guess.
So all the bad guys will go on using Apple’s encryption and FBI will be happy with that.
If all this sounds like “yet another conspiracy theory”, it’s intentional. So none will pay too much attention!
For #3, why does Apple need access to user data? Apple’s revenues come mainly from iPhone and Mac hardware. Google’s revenues mainly come from selling ads.
“Apple needs access to user data, just like Google” – incorrect. Apple wants access to some anonymized data for various reasons like product improvements. Google’s entire business model is your personal data. This has been explained by Apple in the past.
More moderate than the far-right Scalia Court (sic) which recently marshalled Obamacare and gay marriage through the rough seas. A goal to which we can aspire. Excelsior!
Thanks, Tom, for making the point first so I didn’t have to. Even when Scalia was alive, this Supreme Court was about as “far right” as Stalinist show-trial jurisprudence. When they rubber-stamped the “Affordable (sic) Care Act”, they proved that once and for all. “It’s a tax, except when it isn’t a tax, then it’s a fine!” The legal equivalent of dividing by zero.
Scalia’s passing just amounted to smearing the lipstick off this pig. That’s all.
Except… the 3 “far right” justices, Alito, Thomas, SCALIA, dissented from that rubber-stamping:
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2015/06/25/dissent-opinion-on-health-law-subsidies-ruling-key-excerpts/
Keep in mind that “conservative Supreme Court judge” means sticking as close to the original intent of the Constitution’s framers as possible, and that usually includes a strong propensity against the national (“Federal” – really means overall form of state and national governments in combination) government’s sway over the descending hierarchy of governing right down to the base of them all from which the rest are derived, the individual. Scalia was a notable champion of that approach.
Key word: “dissent”. What, exactly, was the judgment of the Court? Scalia was in the minority, therefore in this particular case, his views were functionally irrelevant.
Going down with the ship is noble, but in the end, the ship is still going down.
Ars Technica has a different slant on the issue. What do you think Bob?
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/02/encryption-isnt-at-stake-the-fbi-knows-apple-already-has-the-desired-key/
That Ars Technica link is the first thing I’ve read on this particular case that actually sounds credible and fully thought through.
I am having hard time reconciling the nonsense that John McAfee said, as correctly pointed by Ars, with “I know John McAfee and if he says he can do it, he can do it.” above. Is there some overly subtle sarcasm? Because if not, then Bob comments on security are in general suspect.
Re: “Bob comments on security are in general suspect” . Actually, as a self-described iconoclast, Bob’s comments on everything should be suspect. “Iconoclast”, as defined by Google is “a person who attacks cherished beliefs or institutions”. That’s what he does. Some, if not most, of those cherished beliefs are true, but that won’t prevent an iconoclast from attacking them. Bob’s contribution is getting us to question our cherished beliefs, so we can continue to hold or reject them, intelligently.
I think it’s remarkably naive to believe that the FBI could have physical possession of the phone for two months and not have all its data. If nothing else, clone the sim a few million times onto VMs and brute-force it. Or just develop some custom malware using some of the government’s supply of zero-day exploits. These sorts of attack options are well-documented in the Snowden papers.
So if the FBI already got the phone’s data, why go through this charade? I think there are two things at play here: one is that the FBI wants a legal shield under which it can introduce evidence from that phone in court without having to reveal how the evidence was obtained. My guess is there is enough data to charge one or more persons with crimes related to the shooting and the Government doesn’t want nosy defense lawyers pawing through papers at discovery.
Second, I think the government is making hay while the sun shines. They are scoring points against Apple who are in the position of seeming to defend (the privacy of) some of the most unsavory and disliked persons in recent memory. I don’t think the DOJ will likely ever have a better-looking case with which to bash a tech company in public.
As to SCOTUS you vastly underestimate the time it takes for a case to get there, even if they agree to hear it. Even if you think Obama cares about this (which I highly doubt – have you READ the relevant sections of the TPP?) it’s just too far-fetched for me to think DOJ are trying to make a precedential case on something that could easily be heard by a Justice appointed by whoever succeeds Obama.
‘Cloning’ the phone (and it’s data) doesn’t work that way. Each iPhone has a hardware key (that is physically part of it’s hardware). That key is known only to itself (and not to Apple). The user passcode is entangled with this hardware key to provide the basis for the encryption of the user data.
The hardware key had to have been “known” at the time it was installed, although a record of it may not have been kept.
So, if the FBI says “From now on, when you manufacture a phone, you safely secure the hardware key and serial # for possible future warrants”, then the question becomes: can a hardware key and serial number map be safely secured? If the answer is yes (very questionable), then it would balance privacy with needs of a search warrant: one warrant gets you one hardware key. No universal master key is required.
I believe the hardware key was based on the serial # of the phone.
But this would only allow Apple access to the encypted data, the user code is required to decypt the data.
If this is no longer the case, then It should be possible to remove the FLASH storage from the phone and have it’s manufacturer read the contents from it.
Data recovery services should be able to do it. Just not decrypt it.
you could put the phone on a “bed of nails” tester and read all the memory.
now, you have to play games with the file. was the memory interleaved or written straight? are all the bits in order? — Wozniak’s disk drive controller flipped bits out of the 12345678 order because there were fewer jumps on the board that way. operational patterns like this tend to persist in institutional memory.
I like the idea of 100,000 clones. but the issues above still exist. decryption could be a true bitch for the NSA.
I supose one could take a different phone and save a known pattern to it. Then read the chips to see what pattern they are arranged in first.
“one is that the FBI wants a legal shield under which it can introduce evidence from that phone in court without having to reveal how the evidence was obtained.”
Bingo! “https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-19/secret-memo-details-u-s-s-broader-strategy-to-crack-phones”
I agree the case is multi layered, but Bob is just wrong on the Scalia angle. Scalia was far from a doctrinaire law and order type. Shortly after he joined the Rehnquist court, he stunned court watchers with an opinion overturning a police search and seizure on a technicality.
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/04/us/opinion-by-scalia-opposes-broad-view-of-police-power.html
His opinion included this gem: “‘There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.”
http://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/tulsaworld.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/9/cb/9cbd209c-8bda-5bb7-b715-77ccf68c0e15/56c7cd94b3ce1.image.jpg
There is also a conspiracy that the original moon landing was shot in Arizona.
Getting this in front of the supremes would take far longer than two years. This is Apple. They can drag this thing out for years through other courts and surely will. Just filing this and having it heard takes time, way too close to Scalia’s death.
The DOJ would be risking a far deeper mess if some sort of conspiracy was later exposed. And for the record, Trump has said that Apple should hand the data over.
I also don’t see this as a simple liberal vs conservative issue. Already we see disagree and agreement from both sides of the aisle. The ACLU has already come out supporting Apple has have a number of conservatives.
It seems unlikely that the FBI could crack the phone on their own, given that there is a unique key embedded in the hardware.
McAfee says he would use “social engineering”, i.e. he would try to find a likely PIN or password from other sources. Even he is not actually saying he could crack the encryption, if you read his article carefully.
The FBI have chosen a test case to establish a precedent. If the phone belonged to Joe Soap, a two-bit gangster from Florida, nobody would care, but as soon as the word terrorism is mentioned, the US public duly feels terror.
Apple could accede to the request fairly easily. The question is why they are taking a stand.
Think of it from their point of view. If they accede, then next they will have similar requests from China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc. These may be requests for cracking the phones of dissidents. “You did this for the US Government, why not for us? You still want to sell iPhones in China?”
Once you open the door to such requests, they will become a flood, and this is what Apple doesn’t want. It also doesn’t hurt their business to have a reputation for good security.
McAfee would take some shrooms and commune with the dead terrorists to get the passcode.
Did anyone try to use the initial passcode the phone had when handed over to the “terrorists” from the County?
The Dept of Health bungled the password reset, which is why we are in this predicament in the first place.
“So if you are a President who is a lawyer and former teacher of constitutional law and you’ve come over time to see that this idea of secret backdoors into encrypted devices is not really a good idea, but one that’s going to come up again and again pushed by nearly everyone from the other political party”
(1) Technically, he’s not a lawyer. He gave up his license to practice law decades ago. As far as “teacher” is concerned, well that assumes someone actually learned something from him during his time on a university payroll. Let’s agree that he is a law school graduate and a former university lecturer.
(2) Obama hasn’t “come over time to see” anything; his behavior hasn’t changed one iota in seven years. Everything he does, he does with only two things in mind: (a) How does this benefit me, or my donors, or my political patrons? and (b) How does this increase the political and/or administrative power of my administration?
Given these facts, let’s consider the question at hand.
Does advancing this as some sort of test case benefit Obama personally in any way? Absolutely not. He’s a lame duck, with no place left to go politically.
Does it benefit his donors or political patrons? Possibly, although they know that Obama is lazy and is a lame duck– thus completely unreliable in this instance. Therefore, they wouldn’t waste their time trying to make this happen now. His patrons/controllers will try to work on the next president, whom they believe will be Hillary or Rubio, both of which they control.
Does this increase the political and/or administrative power of the Obama administration? No, because by the time this theoretical case would ever get decided, Obama will be long out of office.
Therefore, we must look elsewhere to understand what might be driving these events.
This is an unbelievably touching amount of faith in the party of President Drone Murder and Dianne Feinstein, but in any case, it gets the politics exactly backwards.
If you wanted to tank a case like this you wanted to do it before Scalia died, since he was the Court’s foremost critic of executive power (see the Hamdi dissent). Democrats are heavily likely to win the next election, which means that one of the ways the Supreme Court will become more moderate is by becoming more supine to the national security state, as Democratic appointees tend to be. It’s nice that Obama is appointing the right people to privacy boards, but he or his successor will also be appointing the “right people” to the Court to make sure the FBI gets what it wants.
As always, very interesting comments, Mr. Cringely. Very interesting indeed. I’m more suspicious of the government and government solutions than you usually are, and less inclined to give Obama (or any President) the benefit of the doubt, but I hope you are right. Which reminds me, I need to show the old PBS Nerd shows to my kids to demonstrate what computer life was like before the internet. 🙂
Point of order Mr. Cringely. The iPhone in question was not owned by Syed Rizwan. It is owned by San Bernardino County and was Rizwan’s county issued work phone. Some are questioning whether San Bernardino County IT wonks properly configured the iPhone. I don’t know how Apple’s enterprise management software works so maybe you or someone else can enlighten the issue.
Tough to take him seriously when he is wrong in the first sentence.
While I enjoy a good conspiracy theory as much as the next person, I agree with others that it would likely take longer to get to the Supreme Court than it will take to replace Justice Scalia. Moreover, if it did reach a Supreme Court with the current eight justices AND they split their opinion 4-4, the finding of the lower court (whatever it might be) would be upheld without precedent. Meaning that a similar case could at a later date go back to the Supreme Court.
Otherwise, I do agree with Bob that there is more going on in this situation than what is being put forward in the media.
“wants Apple to crack it”
Actually if you look at the details of the request, they just want Apple to create a version of iOS which will not wipe the data key if you input 10 wrong PIN’s, and which won’t increase the time between login prompts each time you enter a wrong PIN. Basically the FBI is requesting that Apple make it possible for them to attempt to brute force the PIN.
Cringely, you give Obama too much credit and Scalia too little.
If Obama truly wanted to protect privacy rights he could have used his phone and pen to make drastic changes in how the FBI investigates and how the NSA spies. He has done neither. Cybersecurity and privacy are simply not issues Obama really cares about.
You also assume that Scalia would side with the FBI on this issue. As Justice Ginsburg told the WSJ, “Scalia is often criticized by people who would not be labeled conservative. Liberals don’t count his Fourth Amendment cases or the confrontation clause cases. He is one of the most pro-Fourth Amendment judges on the court.” He was clearly not automatically inclined to side with law enforcement.
What Scalia repeatedly said with regards to privacy rights issues was that they are “best answered by the elected branches of government.” He objected to court rulings that find “a generalized right of privacy that comes from penumbras and emanations, blah blah blah, garbage,” because, “the word ‘privacy’ is absent from the text [of The Constitution].”
So how would Scalia have ruled when confronted with a case in which the FBI is seeking to compel Apple to build a compromised version of their OS in order to help the FBI hack into the phone of a terrorist? I do not think anyone could reliably predict this. He might well have smacked down the FBI’s case and told them to go to congress and ask for a new law that updates the obsolete All Writs Act of 1789 to address modern issues of cybersecurity and privacy.
I agree. Obama asks some impressively tech-savvy people to fill some token advisory roles, but he has done little to fix the roiling injustice of American law enforcement.
Apple already gave the FBI unencrypted copies of the iCloud backups. The backups just don’t contain everything. This has been reported in multiple places. There is in all likelihood zero information on the phone the fbi needs, this is just a convenient high profile case to leverage.
The key here isn’t just that the cracked version of iOS apple creates for the FBI could be used for other iPhones in the US, it also means that other governments will also demand the crack (if it is ok for the fbi to do this, then surely it is ok for russia, china, etc.). Bad. That crack will undoubtably get leaked or stolen. More bad. Within a VERY short time period the security of any data on iOS will be gone.
The USA appointed someone who was not only technically competent, but an expert for the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Wow Washington DC hiring someone who is qualified for the job. That’s a first. I need to note this date in history.
.
Based on our current front runners for the presidential nomination, I fear the USA is going to be led by an incompetent for the next 4 to 8 years.
I do think there is a deeper story here, but I disagree with your premise that this is the government working with Apple to play a political role. I think this is the government realizing it is not going to carry the day on the larger “please install a backdoor” argument, and is looking for a way to salvage it.
What better way to salvage the argument than to point to a highly *specific* act (this phone being supposedly some part of a larger Islamic terrorist plot) and say “this is why we need it”.
This is the high-tech equivalent of the argument the government has used that waterboarding, pulling out fingernails, crushing genitals, etc. are “OK if it means there is an atomic bomb about to go off in Manhattan”. i.e. the television show 24 in real life.
In short, it’s desperation.
If this weren’t February of 2016, but instead October of 2001, most likely Apple doesn’t refuse the order because public opinion would be on the side of “do whatever it takes”. But I think Apple is (rightly) betting that public opinion is on their side.
You had me until:
I honestly stopped reading after that sentence.
Thank you, Cringe, THANK YOU…
…because, finally SOMEBODY is writing an article (or appearing on TV or radio amongst all the mindless talking heads in lockstep) that is geared more towards exposing the game the federal government is actually playing, and what their motives and intentions truly are, in their latest political scheming against yet another corporation that they want to show they can control.
That’s as opposed to blindly following the herd of “sheeple” who seem to be mindless-ly accepting and going along with the “big bad Tim Cook unpatriotic and selfish doesn’t want to cooperate with our government that only wants to keep us safe” mantra. If I hear one more commentator (or see one more blog post) say that “Tim Cook cares more about profits than he does about the lives of U.S. citizens,” I think I’ll barf.
Apple and Tim Cook are no angels but I’m totally on his side on this one……and in my opinion anybody who cares a modicum about keeping government’s abuse of power in check needs to understand that this is simply an opportunistic move by the FBI/DOJ bureaucrats to try to obtain more power and control over big (and eventually small) business.
Didn’t Kevin Spacey (VP Frank Underwood) already do this against Gerald McRainey in “House of Cards?” Come on, man, this is TV polito-drama stuff! A total abuse of power (and totally illegal in this non-lawyer’s opinion) that I hope is stopped.
Thanks for the link to Bellovin’s report. I haven’t read him in over 20 years, not since the Wiley Hacker.
As soon as I hit 65 it’s off to San Felipe for me. I can see it now, kicked back at the beach with my food cart selling grilled lobster tacos and margaritas to the tourists, while drawing my Social Security and Medicare. Tearing around Baja on my little WR250R in my spare time. Which I should have lot’s of for a change.
In the mean time, America will do what it does best, extracting wealth and causing political dysfunction, while continuing winless political actions (wars) around the globe. Perhaps someday America will get around to rebuilding it’s crumbling infrastructure. I seriously doubt it will be done in my lifetime, unless Bernie Sanders is elected.
Make it San Felipe AND Los Cabos and make it a KTM 350 EXC (since money’s no object, ha ha) and count me in too. I’ll happily ride on up to your cart and we can spend the afternoon drinking cervezas, eating tacos de langosta, and discuss the latest happenings in our former home.
Sounds pretty idyllic….hmmmm, daydreaming already…..
You’re making assumptions about the opinions of politicians of both parties and Supreme Court Justices appointed by each that have no basis in reality. The Obama administration has consistently fought to expand the surveillance powers of the government, prominent Republican politicians such as Ted Cruz and Rand Paul have spoken out against their overreach, and as even the left-wing Talking Points Memo acknowledged, Scalia was a strong proponent of preserving the Fourth Amendment’s privacy protections:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/antonin-scalia-fighter-privacy-rights-fourth-amendment
And let’s not forget that it was Democrat Bill Clinton, husband of the current frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for president, who pushed the original Clipper Chip proposal twenty years ago. Hilary Clinton has openly pledged to appoint justices who will curtail the protections afforded by the First and Second Amendments. On what basis are you assuming that would be more likely to protect the Fourth Amendment?
I realize that it’s always tempting to imagine that politicians that you generally prefer will naturally agree with you on every issue, and that politicians that you don’t like are naturally on the other side of those issues, but if you actually did a little research here you’d find that at least as far as privacy protections are concerned you’ve got it 180-degrees backwards.
Yes Michael. It isn’t a democrat vs republican issue. I live on the other side of the world and from there the US political class on both sides seem more intent on setting things up for themselves than the people they are supposed to represent. It seems to be a problem infecting a lot of parliamentary democracies at the moment. The natives of course are restless but the seeming cure on both sides might be worse than the disease. Not that the Eoli will let those candidates get the nomination.
From my reading of Scalia, I think he would have sided with privacy. And it is the Obama government that has been busy extending the reach of executive power and the IRS, EPA, FBI and other agencies for political purposes, of which this iPhone case is just another example. But I strongly doubt those extensions of power and reach into the privacy of US citizens created over the last few years will be rolled back if the Republicans got to have the Presidency. Like catnip to a kitten, the Eoli want to control the Morlocks.
With respect to the concept of a “weakened” iOS that would permit repeated attempts at passcode breaking without the risk of losing data, etc.– How does one install that on an iPhone that can’t be unlocked in the first place?
Rupe
That’s exactly why the FBI needs Apple. Apple and Apple alone holds the key to sign the update which will be installed ( without question behind the scenes on the phone without it being unlocked).
If they can do that, then why can’t the push an update that just sets a new passcode?
Great question. I wish the press would investigate these technical issues, rather than just argue about differing political opinions, leading nowhere.
I think there is another point here that is being overlooked in a lot of the media attention. That point is that Apple is also stating that they cannot crack this phone, and are basically telling all the other governments in the world that it cannot be done. Apple cannot do it for ‘their’ home government, so they cannot do it for another either. Once Apple does this for the USA, there is nothing stopping any other country from compelling Apple to do the same against one of their citizens.
While it is great for the USA to say that they need this because of Terrorists, I am sure other countries will make the same arguments about who they perceive as terrorists and need access to the data on those iPhones.
Re: Scalia . . . met with an unfortunate accident . . . I mean natural death . . . did he ?
really stretching to think there was A Grand Conspiracy (c) to take Scalia out. crissakes, just have an “accidental” fall down the Supreme Court staircase after dark. LOT of concrete stairs there. if he was too bad off to have shoulder surgery, you know, does it really take A Grand Conspiracy (c) to see him fall?
Occam’s Razor, folks. don’t send 12 strong and true men with a 50-point plan to do the job of a simple heart attack. I’ve had 6. My time is just not up yet. Scalia was called home.
No other government in the world is going to believe the NSA can’t get into any iPhone, from the server backup, as Bob pointed out.
President Nixon had to surrender tapes, from a USSC order in 1974. President Clinton was ordered by the USSC to give a deposition in the Paula Jones lawsuit.
President Theodore Roosevelt said it best. “No man is above the law and no man is below it: nor do we ask any man’s permission when we ask him to obey it.”
At the end of the day, is it too much to ask Tim Cook to obey the law?
“…is it too much to ask Tim Cook to obey the law?”
It’s not law that he is disobeying, but rather a court order he is opposing. If court orders couldn’t be opposed and reviewed by higher courts, we’d be under the control of judges, not the law.
This is even loonier than your theory that the purchase of Nokia was about money laundering.
Have you watched The Pelican Brief recently or something?
Re:”your theory” Whose theory, Cringely’s or BA’s? If Cringely’s, why loony?
Thanks, MikeN.
I was trying to remember some of the old movies I would like to see again. This was one of my favorites.
What law is it that says a person must do whatever a judge says or the FBI says?
If they ordered you to bake them a cake, must you do it?
Re:”One important point: I know John McAfee and if he says he can do it, he can do it.” That seems a bit inconsistent with your previous statement: “John McAfee, who is one of my absolute favorite kooks of all time”. He’s either a kook or he can do anything he says he can do, unless you define “kook” as an honest person who never over states his abilities.
[…] take (and there are others) is that Apple probably has the technical capabilities to achieve this and grant the […]
[…] The whole blog is here […]
Antonin Scalia has spent much of his judicial career asserting the protection of the Constitution in favor of the freedoms of the individual and against the abuse of power of the federal and state governments.
This is only natural to look for a grand scheme behind chaos. You’re either an optimist or you need, like all of us, to believe in something, an all encompassing reason. I’ll side with the Coen brothers world view here : all parties involved are caught in their own seemingly unstoppable dynamics, and their interaction is looking like an absurd comedy. Don’t need to look far, the simplest explanation is most often the right one. The FBI by nature wants access to everything it can get to. When Apple needs to protect itself from future less defendable demands, by organizing its own incapacity to compel. Irreconcilable logics. In a Coen movie, I’d say the FBI ends up being caught at very badly operating a woodchipper.
Re” When Apple needs to protect itself from future less defendable demands, by organizing its own incapacity to compel. Irreconcilable logics. In a Coen movie, I’d say the FBI ends up being caught at very badly operating a woodchipper.” Can’t comment since I don’t understand what this says.
The woodchipper remark is a reference to one of the Coen brothers’ films, Fargo. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116282/
Yes, that’s the first thing that comes to mind, it’s like “wood chipper” = “Fargo”, but the comment makes no sense to me.
I disagree with the FBI’s demands. I believe Apple should help. Under court order, the phone should be escorted by the FBI into a secure location within Apple, unlocked or the erase function overridden. The FBI receives iPhone access.
This open entry function should be allowed to stay in Apple’s Labs, and never released to the wild. It is the key IP the company must keep close to the vest.
A backdoor to all iPhones should never be demanded by our government to be unleashed… would that not be the next Apple death-knell?
If a corporation is now a person, wouldn’t this be cruel and unusual punishment?
Re:” I believe Apple should help” I think the problem is that if Apple could brake into encrypted data, there would be an unending long line of government agencies from all countries carrying boxes of iPhones. There desire is to sell unbrakeable encryption to those who want it, where the definition is unbrakeable by anyone, including Apple.
[…] a strange little detour into the conspiracy realm check out Robert Cringely’s take on this: The FBI v. Apple isn’t at all the way you think it is. Lots of lead up to this […]
Just to be clear, when you say “That’s what I am pretty sure is happening”, you mean that the FBI or any law enforcement agency needing decryption, thinks that this is the worst time to bring this issue up to a liberal Supreme court, but they are being forced to by a liberal President, who thinks it’s the best time to bring it up.
Getting to the Supreme Court (from a court of appeals) and losing on a 4-4 tie lets the appeals court ruling stand WITHOUT SETTING A PRECEDENT. Your theory seems flawed in this regard.
Apple’s lawyer made a TV appearance the other day- Ted Olson, who was George W Bush’s lawyer in Bush v Gore, and thought to be a possible Supreme Court appointment.
Meanwhile, earlier this year President Obama said:
‘Police and spies should not be locked out of encrypted smartphones and messaging apps, taking his first public stance in a simmering battle over private communications in the digital age.’
And the previous Democratic President signed the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act of 1994, with a Democratic dominated House and Senate.
Plus it is not clear that Scalia would have taken the government’s side. He voted against allowing police to use thermal scanners to detect heat inside a house to catch marijuana growers.
This is perhaps the most confusing part of Cringely’s article to me “wouldn’t right now be the best of all possible times to kinda-sorta fight this fight all the way to the Supreme Court and lose”. Why would anyone fight with the desire to lose? Sure, it will set a precedent, but if the precedent is the desired one, then isn’t that the definition of winning? Are you saying the Justice Department, for whom the FBI works, really wants to make back doors illegal, so it is instructing it’s employee, the FBI, to sue Apple and lose? That creates a whole new job category “incompetent attorney” “I guarantee I will lose your case”.
They’ve done it before.
When? Any articles discussing a specific known instance?
Take a look at a current case. Various left wing groups have filed a lawsuit seeking an injunction against states that want people to register to show proof of citizenship. EAC agreed to this. The Justice Department agreed with the challenging groups, and did not defend the government. The judge declared he has never seen this.
You can also see similar things where consent decrees are produced so that they don’t have to get Congress to pass a law, and you can make policy by arranging for someone to sue you.
Your “redefimation” of Scalia is low.
I think Cringely is right on this one. Why else would the FBI draw out the exact attack vector they intend want apple to use to break into this model of IPhone. If I were the FBI I would have filed the court papers and requested them to be sealed so I could exploit this over and over again.
Now that the genie is out of the bottle. Apple has no choice but to fix this bug in their next IOS release. You can be pretty confident that you will no longer be able to update firmware without unlocking the device first.
What kind of telly did white guy Uber driver have ?????
What was 3 finger pour Tony doing in Texas ????
What made people support Jeb ????
“If I were to do it I wouldn’t try cracking the phone at all, but its backup on a Mac or PC or iCloud, so maybe that’s the loophole they are using.”
All well and good, but like with most people, the backups were not current (by about 6 weeks, apparently). After the FBI had the iCloud password reset, it prevented any further iCloud backups from taking place because you need to access the phone in order to change the iCloud password there too. Doh!
Cringley,
You have it entirely backward, Apple saw the shift in the court as an opportunity to press the case. With Scalia on the court the odds were in favor of the government. With Scalia dead the odds are in favor of Apple. Thus, apple wants to go all the way to the Supreme Court and win.
Obama was a Constitutional Law Professor, and is a Democrat thus one would THINK that he’d actually be interested in losing this particular case. But history shows that this is simply not true. Obama’s FBI has jailed more whistle blowers than ALL other Presidents combined. Obama has been no friend of civil liberties and Democrats (at least on this issue) should be embarrassed by his record on civil rights. Obama is H.W. Bush when it comes to foreign policy and the so called war on terror. He fully supported the reauthorization of the (ironically named) Patriot Act and has expanded the powers of the executive which includes spying on American citizens.
Regards,
Joe Dokes
I think everybody wants Apple to get all the information off the iPhone for the FBI, we just don’t want all phones to have a means which can easily circumvent the locks already in place.
.
I very much doubt that John McAfee could safely do the job.
Apple’s point is that the statements before and after the comma are mutually exclusive.
My opinion about this has changed over time. Currently I think the most likely scenario is that the 3-letter agencies may indeed be up against a good old-fashioned NP-complete math problem. Irrespective of any bureau/agency’s skunk-works’ ability to probe/exploit/interrogate the UID within various implementations of TPM (including “iEnclave”) using laser-kryptonite hardware-hacking foo, I suspect the political theater we’re seeing would be the same.
The article and the comments are a good illustration of the intractable inclination of humans to ‘discover’ patterns and causation (where none may actually exist). I’m not above it myself, though I try to be self-reflective/critical to recognize it. Whether you’re wrong or right about any particular theory, it feels the same to the theorist.
Math exists, ergo encryption exists. Encryption that can be circumvented is not encryption, it’s a failed attempt at encryption. By the way, I tried to look up NP-complete on Wikipedia, but the only part I understood was this “This article may be confusing or unclear to readers. Please help us clarify the article”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP-completeness
Yea, this is not np-complete, just a very hard problem.
Correction, this is NP complete, but it can be done in constant or linear rather than polynomial time, just has a very big constant.
The definition of NP completeness is about how long it takes to solve a problem. Consider sorting a set of n numbers. Tou can compare every pair and sort in n^2 steps. There are ways to be more efficient.
NP completeness has to do with what can be done in polynomial time vs exponential time.
https://www.mathsisfun.com/sets/np-complete.html
First it was the one phone the FBI wanted access to.
Now the FBI wants Apple to extract data from 12 other phones:
http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/justice-department-wants-apple-to-extract-data-from-12-other-iphones.1957815/
The slope gets slippery.
Then go on a deep breath out via your mouth for that 3 and 4.
Although organic farming would go to great lengths to preserve the surroundings, the organic market just isn’t completely eco-friendly.
Does beer expire As I mentioned around my previous tip
it’s crucial that you plan what foods to enjoy to
stand a higher prospects for sticking together with your diet.
You usually do not have to search camping inside your backyard or
go hiking to your local supermarket. coli—the damaging bacteria that triggers illness for about 73,000 Americans annually.
the “Does eggs spoil this” comment is link spam, and should be removed. Afterward, this comment too.
Do people REALLY believe NSA can’t crack an iPhone?
Or that whatever is released via mass media, isn’t part of a carefully-planned agenda?
Only FIVE corporations … own & control 95% + of American media companies … and control almost 100% of everything we see/hear/believe.
Anyone who claims to believe that these FIVE corporations are NOT in cahoots and/or controlled by the same group which which has their hands up the asses of our political puppets … well, they’re either brainwashed or plain stupid.
Therefore, one must question why the media is pushing this “Apple vs. FBI” garbage down our throats.
My guess – to create a false sense of security among mobile phone users and/or promote Apple as “hero.”
Regardless of the “why” – rest assured, the media’s hardcore, intentional effort to create a fairy tale painting Apple as the saviour, rescuing Americans from the evils of NSA and their illegal snooping under the guise of “breaking the law in order to protect us from ourselves,” is as old as the day is long.
Aside from the “false flags,” “corporate/government incest” and “outright lies” … the hardest thing to swallow … is the programming that has successfully desensitized Americans and/or caused them to resist anything, including the truth, which challenges their current belief systems.
Otherwise, anyone with half a brain would have figured out by now that US media is a tool for the government, and would analyze/criticize each and every story pushed on us, from an entirely different perspective.
If that were the case, we wouldn’t be arguing who was right/wrong, Apple vs. FBI.
Instead, we’d be debating over “the purpose of their circus.”
Hello? This is just another staged event folks.
Once again, anyone who SERIOUSLY believes NSA/FBI can’t “crack” an iPhone, surely must be snorting/shooting/smoking it!
Although I have limited understanding of the technical issues, I consider them irrelevant. Memory by definition is persistant and in practice ambiguous. The two issues that do concern me are the constitution and the budget. What is ‘the right to privacy’ and if the FBI doesn’t know how to crack an iPhone on their stipend, god is great. Take it to a local highschool and let them do it. I believe in ‘open source’, but this is an ‘open wound’.
This sounds like a better explanation than what you put forward Bob:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-02-24/we-just-found-out-real-reason-fbi-wants-backdoor-iphone
There are only two possibilities: either, as Bob said, the FBI, as an arm of the Justice Department, wants to lose the case, or as you point out they want to win the case. Bob claims to be an iconoclast, explaining his position. He did manage to get us to talk about it, some, to think about it as well.
If this was a work phone, should the work have installed some sort of MDM through Apple’s DEP? I know from work experience that if it’s done this way the MDM is always installed even after a device is wiped. So assuming it has then their MDM system should be able to clear the passcode and unlock the device.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3458015/Software-costing-4-month-unlocked-San-Bernardino-killer-s-phone-never-installed-device-despite-paid-for.html
Here is apples explanation of its point of view
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/exclusive-apple-ceo-tim-cook-iphone-cracking-software/story?id=37173343
Mr. Cringely,
Something really puzzles me. How are able to take the time to write this long and intriguing article when your Kickstarter project hasn’t heard from you since 29th of Janurary? Have you any sense of responsibility and professionalism? Some sort of update on Kickstarter would definitely be appreciated. We backers are getting very miffed about the silence. Either refund us our money back or give us an update or we will demand our money back and file a case against you.
Regards,
Cheryl. A mineserver backer.
You’re so awesome! I do not suppose I’ve truly read through a single thing like that before.
So wonderful to discover someone with a few original thoughts on this topic.
Really.. thank you for starting this up. This website is one thing
that is required on the internet, someone with a little originality!
John McAfee better prepare to eat a shoe because he doesn’t know how iPhones work | Ars Technica
http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/john-mcafee-better-prepare-to-eat-a-shoe-because-he-doesnt-know-how-iphones-work/
A Filet of Sole for McAfee, and a side of Crow for Cringely. I’ve been a reader for three decades and am a little saddened by a favorite tech writer slowly becoming out of touch… which probably means the same is happening to me.
OT: Reports Coming in of Big IBM Layoffs Underway in the U.S.
Physical security systems happen to be in existence for too long now to learn the demands
from the growing industry. Moderate sized homes, as an example,
need nothing more over a smoke alarm fitted on each floor.
Alarm systems for the home The modern-day systems now such as a 2 way
voice capacity which allows someone to talk straight away to
monitoring center personnel.
The lights that really should be left on should be seen from your outside
if this technique is to work. People now view the value of experiencing best security alarms systems for homes.
> One important point: I know John McAfee and if he says he can do it, he can do it.
Not really! Not this time!
http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/john-mcafee-better-prepare-to-eat-a-shoe-because-he-doesnt-know-how-iphones-work/
It is nice to buy adult toys of small size, vibrators of mini size will likely be better mainly because it
can taken anywhere especially once you travel.
Essentially, magnetic maze toys work with a magnetic pointer
to let your child pick up a tiny metal ball and guide it throughout the track.
Best nerf guns of 2015 In addition, kids could make their
cherished friends for example mario plush toys behave like real people and they can also make them an element of their lifestyle.
The best hunting rifles, hog hunting rifles semi-automatic hunting rifles and duck hunting shotguns are stocked and ready to go at our
centrally located outlet. You wouldn’t waste any time
whenever you are inside a ‘battle’ reloading your Longshot Nerf.
https://soundcloud.com/william-turton-390273260/john-mcafee-interview-the-daily-dot
https://www.dailydot.com/politics/john-mcafee-lied-iphone-apple-fbi/
“One important point: I know John McAfee and if he says he can do it, he can do it.”
Really? John McAfee now says that when he said he could crack Apple’s encryption he was lying to get attention. https://www.dailydot.com/politics/john-mcafee-lied-iphone-apple-fbi/
In that very article, the following quote was printed twice: “Now, what I did not lie about was my ability to crack the iPhone. I can do it. It’s a piece of friggin’ cake.” So I guess he lied about something to get attention, just not about cracking the iPhone.
If an effective idea this way is about to sway the crowds, where would
they stand and ways in which far will they go.
Potato, although can’t be as effective as other tips in bringing complexion, it can be a best remedy to remove black scars on your face.
Hair care products The main purpose that eyeliner is used is the fact
that it enables the ideal definition from the shape in the eyes.
It is cheap along with only a number of minutes her eyes will really be
noticeable. Not only are you currently about to embark with a wonderful journey with all the love within your life, but from your vanity perspective, stress causes wrinkles.
Protection is often a provider of home security camera installation in NYC.
The former stays in a single position, whilst the latter automatically pans, zooms, and
tilts. Security cameras kansas city Using the footage from the protection cameras
the authorities were competent to begin piecing together what
happened.
Their usage increases at places where it is tricky to deploy man power all time.
The former uses radio frequencies for you signals and may have
a range nearly 300 feet (without obstructions).
It’s called puppet play. It’s used to distract or confuse people as to the true happenings. If Apple is seen by the world as defying the government and “encrypting” their data, then people will continue to trust Apple, thereby protecting a valued ally/asset from the “Snowden effect” (distrust of American Technology). It’s closed source technology, you have no idea what their doing. Do you realize that the only two mobile operating systems in wide use that are even ABLE to properly encrypt things are both american companies? Why do you think the US has basically had Blackberry shutdown? They don’t control the technology that BB10 is based on. QNX scares the American government.
What makes you think Blackberry is shut down? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_Limited
I need a password sooo bad for this site…
Guys with Toys Passwords 2016 – https://www.guyswithtoys.com/?t_link=pimp36157:ft:::13:1
if you have any please email me at xxxadult56 [at] gmail.com