Apple Refuses To Create Iphone Back Door

[Ellipsis]

Background news story here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35594245

Apple statement here:

http://www.apple.com/customer-letter/

Is Apple correct to defy their Government's wishes in this way? Or should they do everything possible to help investigate this act of terrorism?

[Peter Pedant]

// That's a rather good analogy about a court ordered warrant to enter one's house. Would everyone be happy, in this country, if a British court order was obtained?// schweik

the analogy for the court warrant is good only in that it is for one house and one search and one instant.....and I think they (Feds) want to unlock every phone dont they without recourse to a court ?

General Warrants were litigated in the 1760s yes when the land of the free were colonies and were found ot be unlawful. Mansfield I think. General warrants allowed various and unamed houses to be raided
and the yankees are currently squawking about the FBI usedin the american 1789 Warrants Act in a way it was never intended.

so there is an analogy SScweik but not the one you intended

[ yeah yeah I know schweik your brain is gonna 'phut' soon ]

[douglas9401]

It's beyond me why they don't just hand it over to Chloe O'Brien or the wee woman with the wheels in Silent Witness.
45 minutes tops, job done.

[Ellipsis]

>> // Were Turing, Flowers and their teams heroes for hacking the Nazis' communications and shortening WWII by two years, or were they worse than the Nazis themselves for hacking into those communications? //
> o my god where did this thought come from ?
> gay boy Turing as worse than a Nazi - ho hum revisionist history marches on

For the record, I'm a big fan of Turing, Flowers and Bletchley Park, and my choice of language was deliberately provocative - I thought most people appreciated their efforts and wouldn't see it as hacking someone's private communications or, even if they did, that this would be an ethical use of hacking that was in the public good.

The very idea that, if the Nazis had iPhones (far more sophisticated encryption than Enigma), Apple would not help the Allies, is interesting ...

> and I think they (Feds) want to unlock every phone dont they without recourse to a court ?

No, that is one of the "not agreed" points. Everything I've read about what the authorities want suggests the ability to brute-force hack one iPhone, in their physical possession. Some commentators imply that this is the thin end of the wedge that will result in all iPhones being remotely hackable and this is what the authorities "really want", even though they have not said it ...

[Gromit]

The analogy of a search warrant for a house only works if the house is Fort Knox, and the authorities asked for a revolving door to be fitted.

[Peter Pedant]

// nvolving a similar number of people, remained intact and secret until around 25 years AFTER the mid-70s, when part of code-breaking details were declassified. //

um no - winterbotham threatened les girls that if they blabbed he would personally come around and shoot them

and so when it came out ( not really declassified except in the Snowden sense ) one gurl rang the other and said the secret is out

and guess who let it out - Wintgerbotham !!

Cue general swooning and vapours amongst a clutch of now middle aged women - cries of well really ! etc

side issue but if you look at the fates of the code breakers none of them are rewarded ( too secret you see ) - whereas the admin pen pushers do get their gongs and enhanced pensions - and they all disperse I think showing signs of burn out or PTSD

They were truly remarkable men - Shaun Wylie for example retires as Prof of Math at Cambridge at god knows what age and rings up his local sixth form college and asks - do you want me to take A level classes in math? Did the pupils know how lucky they were ?

side issue sorry someone mentioned Bletchley out of context

[Peter Pedant]

// The analogy of a search warrant for a house only works if the house is Fort Knox, and the authorities asked for a revolving door to be fitted.//

I dont understand this comment
which makes me think I must have written it somewhere

[Dogsbody2]

Gromit@Dogsbody2 "Not sure why you keep prattling on about metadata".

Ichkeria "There is a misconception that GCHQ, NSA are spying on everybody. What has happened is that communication has become such that it's impossible often to separate the comms of the good guys (us) from the 'bad guys' (everyone else, of course)."

Eureka! - someone who understands it. The key is metadata; the agencies hoover up all personal data from both good and bad guys in the form of metadata. Over the next 30 days from date of hoovering, it is trawled for pattern matching, and only THEN if matching occurs on metadata are the content of the messages examined further. After 30 days, Gromit's iphone metadata messages to his mum are all deleted.

There's a more in-depth explanation here, Gromit which might help your critical thinking.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world-communications-nsa
It even mentions the term metadata. Come to think of it, wasn't it the Guardian that acted as the mouthpiece for traitor Snowden?

So, as Ellipsis originally asked, is Apple correct to defy their Government's wishes? - no. And there's no reason for Gromit or anyone in the civil liberties band to be alarmed, because their comms won't get past the metadata test - unless of course they are involved in child porn, organised crime, terrorism etc. - all of which are sought using the same searching techniques.

[Gromit]

Google, 'Brandon Mayfield'.

[Ellipsis]

Gromit, surely you use DuckDuckGo ("Our vision is simple. To give you great results without tracking you.") rather than Google?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=brandon+mayfield&ia=about&iax=1

[Gromit]

I would except DuckDuckGo is feeble. I tried it.

I can make a choice to allow how much data I give to Google, I can switch them off to deny them data if I want to. An open door makes my phone vunerable to everyone - frausters, scammers, identity thieves, blackmailers and Governments.

[Ellipsis]

> I would except DuckDuckGo is feeble

There is that. The results for Brandon Mayfield weren't too bad though ... Wikipedia at #1, just like Google!

One of the reasons that Google's search results are better is because they "invade" searchers' privacy in order to improve their algorithm and its relevance to individual searchers, something that DuckDuckGo will never be able to do.

[Ellipsis]

i.e. DuckDuckGo is hamstrung by not having access to the full data, just as the FBI is ...

[Gromit]

// Apple’s big fight with the Federal Bureau of Investigation could have been avoided if one government employee had kept his hands off the phone.
According to a senior Apple executive, the company has been working with the federal government since early January to try to provide a way to access the San Bernardino county-issued iPhone connected with Syed Farook, the gunman in the massacre.

The problem, according to Apple, is that the company was called too late.

That’s because the phone was apparently erased of any chance to access its data only an hour after the device came into government custody. An unnamed person in the San Bernardino County government — likely an information technology employee — reset the Apple ID associated with the iPhone 5C in an attempt to access the data. //

Oh dear. The cops have already fried the iPhone. Nothing of any use can be extracted now anyway.

[Ellipsis]

Interesting report from Mashable but ...

> The problem, according to Apple, is that the company was called too late

If that was the case, it's odd that Apple didn't mention it in their letter to customers.

[sevenOP]

Gromit, here is the trail of lies (well some of them (¦¬]

http://latest.com/2016/02/san-bernardino-shooters-apple-password-changed-while-in-government-possession/

http://wemeantwell.com/blog/2016/02/22/san-bernardino-shooters-apple-password-changed-while-in-government-possession/