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The FBI vs Apple Corp.

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« on: February 18, 2016, 05:15:47 pm »


from The Washington Post....

Why Apple is in a historic fight with the government over one iPhone

The U.S. has forced an encryption showdown years in the making
after a terrorist attack in California that killed 14 people.


By ELLEN NAKASHIMA | 7:55PM EST - Wednesday, February 17, 2016

A worker tries to fix an iPhone in a repair store in New York on February 17th, 2016. — Photograph: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters.
A worker tries to fix an iPhone in a repair store in New York on February 17th, 2016. — Photograph: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters.

IT WAS a compelling set of facts for the government: a terrorist attack in California that killed 14 people, an iPhone possibly containing crucial evidence that could not be unlocked, and a warrant to search the phone.

But the phone's contents are encrypted, and Apple, according to the Justice Department, has refused to help the FBI find a way to unlock the device. So this week, the government got a court to order Apple to help.

In a posted message that verged on the apocalyptic, Apple chief executive Tim Cook accused the government of asking it to build a “backdoor” into an iPhone and to design software that amounts to “hack[ing] our own users.”

Apple argues that starting from the hours after the December 2nd attack until days ago, it has worked with the FBI to give the agency what data it has — material backed up from the phone into the company's iCloud service, for instance. But Apple did not want to do anything that it said would weaken the device's security, such as creating software that would effectively let officials try to crack the phone's password.

In the escalating fight over encryption, the U.S. government has moved to force a showdown that has been years in the making. By Wednesday morning, the Justice Department and the Silicon Valley giant had torqued up the encryption debate, raising the stakes for those who support widespread strong encryption to protect privacy and security and for those who think that courts should be able to compel tech firms to accommodate law enforcement’s need to thwart criminals and terrorist attacks.

“The government wants to lay down a marker here that companies do have to provide assistance when they can,” said Timothy Edgar, senior fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs and a former privacy officer with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “And Apple is saying, ‘We don't want to have to hack our own customers’. The outcome of the case is going to be hugely important for the balance between privacy and security.”

Anyone watching the encryption debate over the past year and a half knew that this day would come. “This is the ideal case for the government to challenge industry in the encryption debate,” said Michael Sussmann, a former Justice Department official and a partner at the Perkins Coie law firm. “The facts are sympathetic to the government and present the starkest example of their need to gain access to encrypted data to protect the American public.”

The device at the center of the debate, an iPhone 5C, was used by Syed Rizwan Farook, who with his wife, Tashfeen Malik, opened fire at a holiday gathering at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino County. The couple, who pledged loyalty to the Islamic State terrorist group, died a few hours later in a shootout with police.

What the government wants Apple to do is design software to install on the phone that would block it from automatically wiping data after 10 unsuccessful tries at entering a password. That would enable the FBI to “brute force” the phone’s password — attempting tens of millions of combinations without risking deletion of the data.

The government also wanted the software to permit the FBI to send passwords to the phone electronically, rather than having someone manually type them in. And the software must prevent the phone from adding delays between password attempts.

The request, the Justice Department said, does not require Apple to redesign its products, to disable the phone's encryption or open its contents. The software, it said, would operate only on that one phone.

Technical experts said that all of that is possible. The question: Is it desirable?

In note titled “A Message to Our Customers” posted on Apple's website, Cook said, “Make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor.” Although government officials say the software would be designed just for one phone, he said that “once created, the technique could be used over and over again, on any number of devices.”

Cook said it would set a dangerous precedent. “The implications of the government's demands are chilling.” If the government has its way, he said, it could “demand that Apple build surveillance software to intercept your messages, access your health records or financial data, track your location, or even access your phone's microphone or camera without your knowledge.”

But New York City Police Commissioner William J. Bratton said the government's demands are reasonable and justified, especially in a case that has ties to the Islamic State, also known as ISIL. “No device, no car and no apartment should be beyond the reach of a court-ordered search warrant,” he said. “As the threats from ISIL become more divergent and complex, we cannot give those seeking to harm us additional tools to keep their activity secret.”

The polarization of the debate can be seen in the use of the term “backdoor”, which Cook accused the government of seeking. The term itself is imprecise and can be understood to mean anything that is intended to create a way around encryption — or more broadly that would weaken security. The government rejects the term for describing what it is asking for.

The White House on Wednesday pushed back against Apple and its framing of the argument. “This case doesn't require Apple … to create a new backdoor,” press secretary Josh Earnest said. “It's a very specific request that the Department of Justice has made, and a judge agreed with them.”

Reaction from Capitol Hill was swift and divided.

“Court orders are not optional, and Apple should comply,” said Senator Richard Burr (Republican-North Carolina), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

A colleague on the committee, Senator Ron Wyden (Democrat-Oregon), said that “companies should comply with warrants to the extent they are able to do so, but no company should be forced to deliberately weaken its products.”

Some legal analysts said the order issued by a federal magistrate judge in Riverside, California, opens a Pandora's box of unknowns. “If a court has the power to order a third party like Apple to devise software that it does not already possess [to aid in surveillance], what can't a court order a company to do?” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at American University. “There's a real search for a limiting principle here that we haven't identified.”

Apple has five business days after Tuesday's order to respond and has vowed to challenge the order.


Mark Berman and Greg Miller contributed to this report.

• Ellen Nakashima is a national security reporter for The Washington Post. She focuses on issues relating to intelligence, technology and civil liberties.

__________________________________________________________________________

Read more on this topic:

 • VIDEO: Why Apple refuses to hack into the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone

 • Read Apple’s open letter to consumers, annotated

 • As encryption spreads, U.S. grapples with clash between privacy, security

 • The centuries-old law the U.S. will use to make its case


https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/why-apple-is-in-a-historic-fight-with-the-government-over-one-iphone/2016/02/17/c512c9ba-d59b-11e5-9823-02b905009f99_story.html
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« Reply #1 on: February 18, 2016, 05:25:45 pm »


So....basically what the FBI are demanding is that Apple create software which doesn't even exist.

What's to stop Apple creating software which appears to work, but in reality doesn't, resulting in the contents of the phone's memory being toasted after ten attempts to hack the password, then saying, “Ooops, sorry....we must have fṳcked-up!!” It would be hard to prove it was or wasn't deliberate.
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« Reply #2 on: February 20, 2016, 01:49:22 pm »


from The Washington Post....

Justice Department: Apple won't help unlock iPhone
due to worry about ‘impact on its reputation’


By MARK BERMAN | 7:48PM EST - Friday, February 19, 2016

An iPhone. — Photograph: Chris Goodney/Bloomberg.
An iPhone. — Photograph: Chris Goodney/Bloomberg.

THE Justice Department filed a motion on Friday lambasting Apple for refusing to help unlock a phone possessed by one of the attackers in December's terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, painting the tech giant's behavior as based on concern only for its business and public relations.

Apple has insisted that helping investigators gain access to the phone's data would compromise the security of other phones. But the Justice Department denies this, saying the tech company is misguided and focused more on “a perceived negative impact on its reputation.”

The new filing is the latest phase in what has become a very public showdown between the federal government and one of the most valuable companies in the world. The confrontation centers on a device that may hold information about a terrorist attack, but it has far-reaching consequences for encryption and the debate between privacy and security.

A senior Apple executive said Friday on that company's refusal to help was about principles rather than marketing, and insisted that the company's focus was on trying to preserve civil liberties and the security of its customers.

Another executive, speaking to reporters on a conference call on Friday afternoon during which Apple officials asked not to be identified, expressed puzzlement that the government filed this latest motion, which he said was largely repeating arguments made in an earlier court order.

That second executive also said that Apple had signed a confidentiality agreement and agreed to keep the contents of discussions between authorities and the company confidential, but said that the motion filed on Friday violated those terms.

In the “motion to compel” filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, federal prosecutors say that allowing Apple to deny their request would thwart an investigation into a terrorist attack.

The government is contending that there could be “relevant, critical communications and data” from around the time of the shooting that are on the phone and were never backed up anywhere.

The Justice Department had sought and received an order from a judge in California asking Apple to disable a feature that automatically wipes data from a phone after 10 incorrect tries at entering a password. This order does not disable the phone itself, but would allow the government to potentially try tens of millions of different combinations to unlock the device.

According to the Justice Department, Apple is not helping the government execute a search warrant. The tech company, though, contends that the Justice Department is trying to force it to imperil other data held on other phones, a category that increasingly includes health records and other personal information.

After that order was signed, Apple chief executive Tim Cook posted an open letter on the company’s website depicting the request as “chilling” and “unprecedented”.

The government “asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create,” he wrote. “They have asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone.”

In its filing Friday, the Justice Department dismissed this contention, saying that Apple would “retain custody of its software at all times” without compromising the security of iPhones.

A spokesperson for Apple did not immediately respond to a request for further comment on Friday.

Meanwhile, the fight could soon head to Capitol Hill. Members of Congress sent letters to Cook and FBI Director James B. Comey inviting them to testify before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce's oversight and investigations subcommittee, calling the current moment “a critical juncture” in the ongoing debate.

These letters were signed by Representative Fred Upton (Republican-Michigan), chair of the committee, Representative Frank Pallone Jr. (Democrat-New Jersey) and two other members.

The government had asked for the order signed earlier this week under the All Writs Act, which dates back to 1789 and has been used to issue a variety of orders not otherwise governed by any statute. The Justice Department states in its filing that Apple has recognized the act in the past and helped search devices running earlier versions of its operating systems.

“Apple … did not assert that it lacks the technical capability to execute the order, that it is not essential to gaining access into the iPhone, or that it would be too time — or labor-intensive,” the filing states.

It continues: “Rather, Apple appears to object based on a combination of: a perceived negative impact on its reputation and marketing strategy were it to provide the ordered assistance to the government, numerous mischaracterizations of the requirements of the order, and an incorrect understanding of the All Writs Act.”

The current debate centers on an iPhone that belonged to Syed Rizwan Farook, who along with his wife, Tafsheen Malik, fatally shot 14 people during a December 2nd attack in San Bernardino, California. Both attackers pledged fealty to the Islamic State, and authorities are still looking into whether the pair had any ties to groups or people operating overseas.

Federal investigators have been unable to unlock the phone, which means they have not been able to access the data stored on the phone and not backed up anywhere else.

“It has been two months now, and we are still working on it,” Comey told Congress last week.

Authorities have also been unable to figure out what the attackers did during an 18-minute period that occurred in the four hours between the attack and a bloody gun battle that ended with police officers killing them both.

While FBI agents have searched other digital devices and accounts belonging to the attackers — which is how they found the Facebook page where Malik posted her pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State's self-proclaimed emir — they have been unable to get into the iPhone 5C that Farook was given as part of his job with the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health.

Because Farook's phone was locked, if the FBI tried 10 different incorrect passwords, the phone's data would be wiped. The Justice Department is arguing that rather than creating a backdoor, its request to turn off the auto-erase function is akin to what a phone's owner could do on their own and is more like when a person updates their apps or operating system.

Investigators have only been able to search data from the phone backed up to iCloud through to October 19th, about six weeks before the attack, the motion filed on Friday states, but that data does not include times Farook used the phone to communicate with his wife in the five months before the attack.

The filing notes that the FBI and Apple discussed other ways to try to access information on the locked phone, including trying to back up the phone's data to an iCloud account.

The Apple executive, speaking on the call with reporters, said that engineers tried to help the government find other ways to access the data, like trying to connect it to a trusted WiFi network. These options did not work.

That same executive noted that within hours of the government taking possession of the phone, the Apple ID password was changed.

According to the Justice Department's filing, the county health department, which owned the phone, had remotely reset the iCloud account's password while seeking information in the hours after the attack. As a result, the phone could not be automatically backed up to that account after the password was changed.




Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who has criticized Apple this week for refusing to help, called on Friday for a boycott of the company.

“What I think you ought to do is boycott Apple until such time as they give that security number”, Trump said during a town hall in Pawley's Island, South Carolina. “How do you like that? I just thought of it. Boycott Apple.”

He pointed out that the phone is government-owned before saying that “Tim Cook is looking to do a big number, probably to show how liberal he is.”


Jose DelReal in Pawley’s Island, South Carolina, and Ellen Nakashima in Washington contributed to this report.

• Mark Berman covers national news for The Washington Post and anchors Post Nation, a destination for breaking news and stories from around the country.

__________________________________________________________________________

Read more on this topic:

 • Read Tim Cook's full letter to Apple

 • Apple vows to fight the order to help unlock the phone

 • Should Apple unlock a phone tied to the San Bernardino attack? Lawmakers say yes and no.

 • San Bernardino shooter spent years steeped in extremism before attack

 • San Bernardino shooters had been radicalized for ‘some time’, FBI says


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/02/19/justice-dept-says-apples-refusal-to-unlock-iphone-is-due-to-worry-about-impact-on-its-reputation
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« Reply #3 on: February 21, 2016, 02:32:09 am »



http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/apple/apple-offers-fix-error-53-bug-apologizes-customers-n521676
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« Reply #4 on: February 21, 2016, 08:59:25 am »

Surely if Apple are so good they could ask the FBI for the phone, unlock it, and give it back to the FBI without disclosing how they did it. Wouldn't that be the simple answer?
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« Reply #5 on: February 21, 2016, 09:18:04 am »

Surely if Apple are so good they could ask the FBI for the phone, unlock it, and give it back to the FBI without disclosing how they did it. Wouldn't that be the simple answer?
Exactly.
The US govt want a back door into every appliance.  That's the only reason I can see for this move.
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« Reply #6 on: February 21, 2016, 02:03:10 pm »


from The Washington Post....

FBI asked San Bernardino to reset the password
for shooter’s phone backup


By ELLEN NAKASHIMA and MARK BERMAN | 7:02PM EST - Saturday, February 20, 2016

The Justice Department is in high-stakes battle with Apple over whether the government can use the courts to force Apple to create software to help it unlock a customer's iPhone. — Photograph: Erik S. Lesser/EPA.
The Justice Department is in high-stakes battle with Apple over whether the government can use the courts to force Apple to create software
to help it unlock a customer's iPhone. — Photograph: Erik S. Lesser/EPA.


IN THE chaotic aftermath of the shootings in San Bernardino in December, FBI investigators seeking to recover data from the iPhone of one of the shooters asked a technician in the California county to reset the phone’s iCloud password.

But that apparent fog-of-war error foreclosed the possibility of an automatic backup to the Apple iCloud servers that might have turned up more clues to the origins of the terrorist attack that killed 14 people.

“The county and the FBI were working together cooperatively to obtain data, and at the point when it became clear the only way to accomplish the task at hand was to reset the iCloud password, the FBI asked the county to do so, and the county complied,” David Wert, a spokesman for San Bernardino County, said in an email.

The Justice Department disclosed the mis-step in a court filing on Friday, which is part of a larger, high-stakes battle over whether the government can use the courts to force Apple to create software to help it unlock a customer's iPhone — in this case, one used by Syed Rizwan Farook. Farook, a county health worker, and his wife were killed in a firefight with police hours after the December 2nd attack.

“This was happening hours after the worst terror attack since 9/11, and there were still credible reports of a third shooter,” said a federal law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. “It was a very dynamic time, and the number one priority was figuring out what happened and if there were more attacks coming.”

According to senior Apple executives, the FBI's first call to Apple for help came on Saturday, December 5th, at 2.46 a.m. With a subpoena, the bureau obtained subscriber data and other details. On Sunday, the FBI, with a warrant, obtained data from Farook's iPhone that had been backed up to iCloud. That backup contained information only through to October 19th, six weeks before the attack.

The same Sunday, the FBI asked the county for help in retrieving data from the phone, Wert said in an interview. “So the county said we could get to the information on the cloud if we changed the password, or had Apple change the password,” he said. “The FBI asked us to do that, and we did.”


Apple chief executive Tim Cook, shown here in a 2013 appearance before a Senate committee, has pledged to fight an order to help the federal government access data officials believe is stored on the iPhone linked to the San Bernardino terrorists. — Photograph: Shawn Thew/EPA.
Apple chief executive Tim Cook, shown here in a 2013 appearance before a Senate committee, has pledged to fight an order to help the federal
government access data officials believe is stored on the iPhone linked to the San Bernardino terrorists. — Photograph: Shawn Thew/EPA.


It is not clear why the FBI needed to reset the password if it was able to obtain the backed-up data from Apple. The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Nonetheless, by resetting the password, the county, which owned Farook's phone, and the FBI eliminated the possibility of seeing whether additional data beyond October 19th might be recovered from the phone through the auto-backup feature, experts said.

The FBI in a court filing said Farook “may have disabled” the auto-backup. But, tech experts said, there might be other reasons the phone did not back up: It was not near a WiFi network it was familiar with such as his home or workplace, or it was not turned on long enough to back up. With the password changed, it is impossible to know.

“Even though it has been reported that the iCloud backups were disabled, there still is data that may have been recoverable,” said security expert Dan Guido, chief executive of Trail of Bits. Depending on the phone’s settings, it might have synched notes, emails, address books — perhaps geolocation data — with the company's network.

“This could have resulted in nothing,” Guido said. “Or it could have resulted in all the data on the phone.”

The showdown between Apple and the government arises out of the FBI's inability to recover data from Farook's phone — especially for the weeks prior to the attack. The Justice Department on Tuesday got a federal judge to order Apple to build software to override an auto-wipe feature on the phone that deletes data after 10 failed tries to enter a password. The FBI could then try to crack the phone's password by “brute-force”, making many attempts without risking the wiping of the data.

Apple chief executive Tim Cook said the firm would challenge the order, warning that it would set a “chilling” precedent that could lead to more invasive requests for data. On Friday, the Justice Department fired back, charging that Apple's stance was motivated by “marketing” concerns as it promotes itself as a protector of consumer privacy.


• Ellen Nakashima is a national security reporter for The Washington Post. She focuses on issues relating to intelligence, technology and civil liberties.

• Mark Berman covers national news for The Washington Post and anchors Post Nation, a destination for breaking news and stories from around the country.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-asked-san-bernardino-to-reset-the-password-for-shooters-phone-backup/2016/02/20/21fe9684-d800-11e5-be55-2cc3c1e4b76b_story.html
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« Reply #7 on: February 22, 2016, 05:59:11 am »


so let me get this right iphone 6 after 10 attempts and fails at password deletes all the phone's data?

i find it hard to believe there are no back doors into iphone 6
saying there is no backdoor and then protesting about it on the media seems like a sneaky stunt
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« Reply #8 on: February 22, 2016, 07:01:53 am »

I am of 2 minds here.
On the one hand, I believe an elected government should be able to ensure the safety of its citizens, on the other I also believe a citizen should be safe from untoward snooping by the government.
American federal agencies do not exactly have a stellar reputation when it comes to citizens rights - or for that matter, the rights of other countries citizens. 
I therefore don't want to see them with an open ticket to accessing anyone's devices.
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« Reply #9 on: February 22, 2016, 09:50:06 am »

i could be wrong Yak but i believe almost every new electronic product already has back doors built into them
and this story could be fake to  convince people to think there is no back door into iphone 6 so the american NSA
can hide this truth like an ace up their sleeve lol
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« Reply #10 on: February 23, 2016, 08:49:11 am »

I am of 2 minds here.
On the one hand, I believe an elected government should be able to ensure the safety of its citizens, on the other I also believe a citizen should be safe from untoward snooping by the government.
American federal agencies do not exactly have a stellar reputation when it comes to citizens rights - or for that matter, the rights of other countries citizens. 
I therefore don't want to see them with an open ticket to accessing anyone's devices.


What about key loggers?


Sorry this is a vid, Yak; 
I think your home connection problems prevent you viewing them, so just search the keyword " keylogger ".


NB:  Although the word key appears twice in this message this is not to suggest in Any Way that a person who unfortunately bears that name could be involved in the practice ... 

             

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« Reply #11 on: February 26, 2016, 12:14:14 am »


from The Washington Post....

Apple is working to make iPhones even tougher to hack into

By ELLEN NAKASHIMA and TODD C. FRANKEL | 9:15PM - Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Photograph: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg.
Photograph: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg.

FEARING that the government may be able to order it to bypass security features in newer-model phones, Apple has quietly begun working on enhancements that would prevent the company from updating the software of an iPhone without knowing a user's password, according to individuals familiar with the effort.

These security improvements would make it impossible for Apple to help the government unlock newer iPhones in the manner authorities want the company to do so now. The move would force those authorities to find a new technical solution even if they gain the legal authority to force the company to unlock the phones of suspects.

The move by Apple is another twist in a high-profile battle between Apple and the Justice Department which last week demanded that the company help unlock the iPhone of Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the killers in the San Bernardino, California shooting rampage.

The enhancement will not work on older model phones, such as the iPhone 5C used by Farook. But engineers are trying to address the issue on newer models, which have a security feature called Secure Enclave that protects some of the most sensitive data such as the phone's encryption keys. Currently, the software on the Secure Enclave can be updated without knowing a user's password.

That, Apple engineers realized, was a vulnerability. Those engineers began thinking about addressing the issue before the San Bernardino attacks, but the fix became a priority more recently, said the individuals familiar with the effort, which was first reported by The New York Times.

An Apple spokesman had no comment.

Security experts hailed Apple's move, saying that the phones will become more secure to a universe of threats, including hackers or even insiders who might leak secrets.

“They've never thought before that they might be forced by the government to break into its own products and reverse security procedures,” said Jonathan Zdziarski, a security researcher who has himself proposed about a dozen solutions to the problem to Apple. “Now that they've been forced into this mode of thinking, a lot of the security updates in the future will be not just to keep the hackers out, but to keep themselves out until the user authorizes the update.”

News of the attempted technical fix broke on the same day Apple chief executive Tim Cook defended his company's controversial refusal to help the FBI access the passcode-locked iPhone belonging Farook.

Cook said that helping the FBI to bypass the iPhone's security “could expose people to incredible vulnerabilities”. “This would be bad for America,” Cook said during an interview on ABC's World News Tonight With David Muir.  “It would also set a precedent that I believe many people in America would be offended by.”

This was Cook's first public interview since a federal magistrate judge in Riverside, California, last week ordered Apple to develop a way to access Farook's iPhone. Cook had previously written a public letter objecting to the court order. That touched off a heated national debate over questions about technology and surveillance. Cook had also sent an email to Apple employees making his case.

Cook said Apple tried to help the FBI with other technological solutions, offering “significant advice” on how the iPhone might be cracked. But Apple does not want to go as far as the FBI says it now needs — writing software to get around the phone's security measures. Cook called it “the software equivalent of cancer”.

“What is at stake here is can the government compel Apple to write software that we believe would make hundreds of millions of customers vulnerable around the world, including the U.S., and also trample civil liberties,” Cook said.

Cook said this case was about the future, rather than this one particular iPhone.

FBI Director James B. Comey, in a letter published on Sunday, wrote that this case highlights the tension between privacy and safety.

“That tension should not be resolved by corporations that sell stuff for a living,” Comey wrote.

Cook, in his interview, insisted that obeying by this one court order means opening hundreds of other Apple devices that law enforcement wants access to, as well.

“It is a slippery slope. I don't fear one — it is one,” Cook said.

Asked by Muir if Cook ever has any doubts that opening this iPhone might help prevent a terrorist attack.

“David, some things are hard and some things are right. And some things are both,” Cook said. “And this is one of those things.”


• Ellen Nakashima is a national security reporter for The Washington Post. She focuses on issues relating to intelligence, technology and civil liberties.

• Todd C. Frankel is a reporter covering people and policy for The Washington Post.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/02/24/apple-is-working-to-make-iphones-even-tougher-to-hack-into
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« Reply #12 on: February 26, 2016, 02:54:02 am »


from The Washington Post....

Tim Cook: Protecting America from itself
 — and protecting Apple from America


By FRED BARBASH and JUSTIN WILLIAM MOYER | 5:15AM EST - Thursday, February 25, 2016

Tim Cook in 2014. — Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters.
Tim Cook in 2014. — Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters.

WHEN murderers armed with semiautomatic weapons killed 14 people at a holiday party on the campus of the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California, on December 2nd, the nation was outraged and terrified. Though the traditional prayer vigils followed, the high body count and religious affiliation of the killers meant this would be no typical mass shooting. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump called for a halt to Muslims entering the country — a declaration that found considerable support. The next month, President Obama issued executive orders to, as the White House put it, “make our communities safer”. A climate of fear once again spread across the country.

But when the FBI asked Apple chief executive Tim Cook for help in the San Bernardino investigation — to unlock an iPhone used by one of the killers — he said no. Ordinarily, in such situations, everything is handled quietly. To the extent that companies talk, they talk through spokesmen and lawyers who usually say nothing except: “We don't comment on pending litigation.”

But Cook dispensed with all of that. He went public, in his own name, and he did it personally, going on TV on Wednesday in an extended interview to explain himself. And now he's become the leader not just of America's most valuable company but also of a movement. Now, it's the United States versus Tim Cook — and an extraordinary moment both for corporate America, the federal government and of course, for Cook, who, at this moment, is providing at least part of the answer to the question that has nagged him: How do you follow Steve Jobs.

Rallies have been organized in about 50 cities in protest of the FBI's demands. Organizations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International have lined up in support of Cook.

“Apple is right to fight back in this case,” said a statement from Sherif Elsayed-Ali, deputy director of global issues at Amnesty. “The FBI's request, which would in practice require Apple to rewrite its operating system to weaken security protections, would set a very dangerous precedent. Such backdoors undermine everyone's security and threaten our right to privacy.”

Cook also has attracted support from libertarians, such as Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute. Apple's resistance to the FBI order transcends the question of “whether the federal government can read one dead terrorism suspect's phone,” he wrote, but forces us to ask “whether technology companies can be conscripted to undermine global trust in our computing devices. That's a staggeringly high price to pay for any investigation.”

And this is just the beginning of what's bound to be an epic legal battle, perhaps at the Supreme Court, should the government press its demand. “We would be prepared to take this issue all the way,” Cook said on Wednesday evening. He's well armed for that, having already enlisted one of the nation's top Supreme Court litigators, Ted Olson, a former U.S. solicitor general. Olson is good, as a lawyer and as a symbol. Even Donald Trump may be wary of slapping a “soft-on-terrorists” label on a man who lost his wife on 9/11 — when Barbara Olson died aboard aboard American Airlines Flight 77 as it crashed into the Pentagon.

Cook is no longer just a CEO. “I think he's a national security hero right now,” Nico Sell, co-chairman of Wickr, an encrypted messaging app, told NPR, “and more of us need to follow him.”

The man who said “I don't consider myself an activist” when he reluctantly came out as gay two years ago in Bloomberg Businessweek — a publication not known for its presence on every coffee table —  is now talking about “the best of America” on national television, invoking the name of the country at least 14 times in 29 minutes.

“I think we're seeing something kind of unique,” Michael Cusumano, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Mic. “When the CEO of Apple speaks, people listen. I think that it is the same for Google or Microsoft or GE. But you don't find those CEOs speaking out very much. He's got a sharper edge to him than I think we thought he had.”

“Cook has chosen to put himself and Apple at center stage on an issue of central importance to the technology industry, criminal justice, and society, with no assurance of where this choice will lead,” wrote Geoff Colvin in Fortune magazine. “He apparently just believes it's time this issue got confronted head-on. That's leadership behavior, and whatever the outcome, it elevates Apple's status.”

Cook's passion was in full display on Wednesday night during an extended interview with ABC News. Yes — the Declaration of Independence was there, too.

“This is our country,” Cook said. “This country is about life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It's about freedom of expression and freedom of speech. These are core principles of America.”

He cited his support among the armed forces.

“I've gotten thousands of emails since this occurred and the largest single category of people are from the military,” he said. “These are men and women who fight for our freedom and our liberty. And they want us to stand up and be counted on this issue for them.” He added: “I am reading every one of them.”


Tim Cook in 2014. — Photograph: Jeff Chiu/Associated Press.
Tim Cook in 2014. — Photograph: Jeff Chiu/Associated Press.

Of course, to critics, there's nothing heroic about Cook's stand. Trump, another businessman leading a movement, called for a boycott of Apple until it cooperates with the government. New York Police Commissioner William Bratton and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said Apple is compromising public safety.

“San Bernardino is now the most prominent, national example of how Silicon Valley's decisions are thwarting serious criminal investigations and impeding public safety,” they said in the statement. “When Apple made the overnight switch to default device encryption in September 2014, the company clearly gave no notice or thought to the impact that decision would have on crime victims.”

FBI Director James B. Comey has personally challenged Cook's stance. “We have awesome new technology that creates a serious tension between two values we all treasure — privacy and safety,” Comey wrote. “That tension should not be resolved by corporations that sell stuff for a living. It also should not be resolved by the FBI, which investigates for a living. It should be resolved by the American people deciding how we want to govern ourselves in a world we have never seen before.”

The Justice Department, meanwhile, accused Apple of fighting not for principle, but “for its business model and public brand marketing strategy.” In fact, prosecutors point out, the phone did not belong to Syed Rizwan Farook, who with his wife opened fire at the Inland Regional Center. It belonged to the county public health department, where he was an inspector. But to crack it, the government wants Apple to disable the feature that wipes the data on the phone clean after 10 incorrect tries at entering a password. That way, the government can try to crack the password using “brute force” — attempting tens of millions of combinations without risking deletion of the data, as The Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima explained.

There's no reason to think that Cook's rhetoric on San Bernardino isn't genuine. He has long been an advocate of encryption, defending his company's technology on NPR last year, before the attack in California.

In that interview, host Robert Siegel said: “If there's some text message that supposedly concerns hijacked airplanes and skyscrapers and dirty bombs, would you say, ‘The government, you could have that?’”

Cook: “The government comes to us from time to time, and if they ask in a way that is correct, and has been through the courts as is required, then to the degree that we have information, we give that information. However, we design our products in such a way that privacy is designed into the product. And security is designed in. And so if you think about it … some of our most personal data is on the phone: our financial data, our health information, our conversations with our friends and family and co-workers. And so instead of us taking that data into Apple, we've kept data on the phone and it's encrypted by you. You control it.”

Cook's message now is the same: A backdoor into the iPhone would be “sort of the equivalent of cancer,” as he told ABC. It's just his delivery of that message that has changed.

And what's good for America, it seems, is good for Apple. Cook isn't defending encryption on a whim. Apple has sold more than 800 million iPhones and wants to sell more. Secrets are his brand. Indeed, Apple is working on new code for its iPhone software that would make it difficult for it to comply in the future with court orders like the one in the San Bernardino case.

“It's a masterful stroke of speechifying,” Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch wrote last year of Cook's public defenses of privacy. “… By taking this stance (which I do not believe to be disingenuous, their profit centers support it), Apple has put all other cloud companies in the unfortunate position of digging themselves out of a moral communications hole to prove their altruism when it comes to user data.”

When the government — or governments — want Apple's user data, it makes it harder for the folks in Cupertino to do business. And when the biggest company in the country can't do business, that's bad. Maybe this is why, as Cook told ABC, he plans to meet with President Obama.

Indeed, some think the well-being of the entire U.S. tech sector may be at stake. “Remember the early days of the web, when people were afraid to enter their credit card details?” wrote James Allworth in Harvard Business Review. “It took years to get to a point where there was enough trust that buying things online was considered normal.”

He added: “Already it's the case that America's European allies don't trust the U.S. with their citizens' social media data. After forcing a backdoor into Apple's phones — and who knows which could be the next company that gets a knock on the door — what is the rest of the world going to think?”


• Fred Barbash, the editor of Morning Mix, is a former National Editor and London Bureau Chief for The Washington Post.

• Justin William Moyer is a reporter for The Washington Post's Morning Mix.

__________________________________________________________________________

Read more on this topic:

 • How they line up on Apple vs. the FBI

 • Why even the FBI can't hack the iPhone

 • PHOTOGRAPH GALLERY — Apple: A history of one of the world's most valuable companies


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/02/25/tim-cook-protecting-america-from-itself-and-protecting-apple-from-america
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« Reply #13 on: February 26, 2016, 01:10:22 pm »


from The Washington Post....

FBI, Apple to appear before Congress for hearing on encryption

By MARK BERMAN | 2:16PM EST - Thursday, February 25, 2016

FBI Director James Comey. — Photograph: Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press.
FBI Director James Comey. — Photograph: Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press.

THE head of the FBI and Apple's general counsel will testify before Congress next week amid the public debate over whether the tech giant should help agents unlock an iPhone used by one of the shooters in December's terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, California, federal authorities said on Thursday.

This announcement comes as the two sides are waging an increasingly public dispute that centers on one iPhone but touches on much larger issues of privacy and security in a digital world. The FBI has insisted that its requests in the case are narrow and aimed only at finding other terrorists; Apple argues that the government's demands threaten “everyone's civil liberties.”

FBI Director James B. Comey and Bruce Sewell, Apple's general counsel, will appear as witnesses on two different panels on Tuesday, according to the House Judiciary Committee.

“Americans have a right to strong privacy protections and Congress should fully examine the issue to be sure those are in place while finding ways to help law enforcement fight crime and keep us safe,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (Republican-Virginia) and ranking Democrat John Conyers Jr. (Democrat-Michigan) said in a joint statement on Thursday.

Sewell's panel will also include Cyrus R. Vance Jr., district attorney for New York County. Vance and William J. Bratton, the New York City police commissioner, released a statement last week saying that Apple's refusal to comply with the FBI is proof of how tech companies “are thwarting serious criminal investigations and impeding public safety.”

The FBI has been unable to unlock an iPhone 5C that was used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of two shooters who killed 14 people and wounded 22 others in the December 2nd attacks in California. Agents have been able to access data from older iCloud backups from the phone, but they are seeking data that remains on the phone, which was given to Farook for his job with the county health department.

Last week, the Justice Department sought and obtained a California judge's order telling Apple to disable a feature that automatically clears data from a phone after 10 incorrect attempts at entering a password. Apple chief executive Tim Cook responded with a public letter saying that the government was asking for “something we consider too dangerous to create.” Cook told ABC News in an interview on Wednesday that the request is “bad for America”.

The Justice Department, meanwhile, said in a court filing that Apple is only concerned about its marketing, which the company has disputed. Apple has called on the department to withdraw its demands for help and instead form a panel of experts or a commission to discuss the issue.

Comey wrote a public letter asking people to “take a deep breath” and insisted that the government is not trying to set a precedent with its request.

“Maybe the phone holds the clue to finding more terrorists,” he wrote. “Maybe it doesn't. But we can't look the survivors in the eye, or ourselves in the mirror, if we don't follow this lead.”

Apple has begun working on security enhancements that would make it impossible for the company to unlock newer iPhones in the manner being requested now, which means that even if the Justice Department prevails in its current battle, authorities may need to find another technical solution in the future.


• Mark Berman covers national news for The Washington Post and anchors Post Nation, a destination for breaking news and stories from around the country.

__________________________________________________________________________

Read more on this topic:

 • Why Apple is in a historic fight with the government over one iPhone

 • How tech executives and politicans line up on Apple vs. the FBI

 • Why you hear conflicting stories about whether the public supports Apple or the FBI


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/02/25/fbi-apple-to-testify-before-congress-on-march-1
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« Reply #14 on: February 26, 2016, 01:26:55 pm »

John McAfee offers to unlock killer's iPhone for FBI



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« Reply #15 on: February 26, 2016, 02:00:48 pm »


from The Washington Post....

This one thing could hurt Apple's case in Washington

By BRIAN FUNG | 4:03PM EST - Thursday, February 25, 2016

APPLE's fight with the FBI is widening beyond the courts. The company now wants to lay the debate before Congress, where new legislation could help keep the government at bay as it tries to gain access to a phone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters.

But the tech company's odds may be hindered due to a strategic choice that stretches back years, lobbyists and former congressional staffers say. Here's why.

Apple’s lobbying presence in Washington is tiny compared to other tech firms. The company spent roughly $4.5 million on lobbying last year, which sounds like a lot, until you look at some of its peers.


Graph: Center for Responsive Politics.
Graph: Center for Responsive Politics.

Microsoft spent roughly double what Apple did in 2015, lobbying records show. Facebook's lobbying budget was nearly $10 million last year. And Google spent nearly $17 million — nearly four times as much as Apple.

Apple has vastly expanded its lobbying under chief executive Tim Cook, who took over the company in 2011. It has devoted more money to lobbying in the past 5 years than in all of the last 13 years prior to that, combined. It's a member of nearly two dozen trade associations with big Washington operations such as the Consumer Technology Association and The App Association, according to Apple's public policy website. Apple hired former Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa Jackson in 2013 to work on environmental policy issues, and it has snapped up top Hill staffers from both political parties.

But Apple has generally pursued a policy of detachment, say experienced lobbyists and congressional hands. And the company's reluctance to rub elbows with policymakers has left Cook with little maneuvering room.

In fact, some added, Apple has failed to grasp a foundational lesson in policymaking: Lobbying isn't just about asking the government for things.

“A big part of being in Washington is about preventing problems,” said one lobbyist, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record. “They do want something, but what they want is to be left alone. But that takes lobbying.”

Apple has important interests in Washington. For example, Cook's last major appearance before Congress dealt with the tens of billions in taxes the company would have to pay if it brought all the money it holds overseas back into the United States. And the company's latest dance with the Justice Department, over cellphone encryption, has been years in the making.

Yet Apple has seldom taken a leading role in inside-the-Beltway debates, said a former congressional staffer who specializes in technology issues. Instead, the company prefers to allow other companies to advocate publicly or privately on issues they have in common.

“There are certainly certain items they missed out on by not being more aggressive,” said the staffer. “And I can assure you they missed out on building a relationship with congressional members and offices that other entities — that do play the inside-the-Beltway game — are able to cultivate.”

In some ways, Apple's relative dearth of relationships on Capitol Hill makes it a more vulnerable target. Unlike companies with large, well-funded lobbying teams, Apple lacks the means to avoid the government spotlight when it happens to settle upon them. Apple has few lawmakers that it can reliably call to its defense, though in the current confrontation with the Justice Department, high-profile members such as Senator Ron Wyden (Democrat-Oregon) and Representative Darrell Issa (Republican-California) have volunteered for the role.

What makes Apple's studied silence in Washington all the more mysterious is the company's position at the top of the global economy. It has more cash than a typical company would know what to do with. Why not take a fraction of that money, and invest it in politicians Apple might someday need?

One reason may be that Apple believes its universally respected brand literally speaks for itself: During the 2013 tax hearings, members of Congress spent as much time prodding the company's tax practices as they did waving around and complimenting its products.

Apple may also subscribe to the idea that Washington is for slimy people doing slimy things, which would not be out of character for a company based in Silicon Valley. Apple's late founder, Steve Jobs, long eschewed getting the company mixed up in Washington politics.

But Apple can no longer afford to avoid dealing with Washington, said Representatie Adam Schiff (California), the topmost Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

“In the earlier days of Apple, they wanted little to do with the federal government,” said Schiff. “… [but] I had a long conversation yesterday with Apple's general counsel on the legal issues involved [in the iPhone case] and that's a good indicator of just how engaged they are.”

In some cases, it has taken a high-profile dispute to pull tech companies into Washington. Microsoft, for one, took pains to avoid Washington until antitrust officials took the company to court in the late 1990s. Since then, Microsoft has maintained a steady presence in Washington: It spent 140 percent more on lobbying in 2004 than it did in 1998. And it has even become Apple's ally in its fight against the FBI; the Redmond, Washington company said on Thursday it would file a court brief supporting Apple's position on encryption.

Ultimately, Apple's reticence to play Washington hardball may be a good thing for democracy, if you take the view that corporations should be reinvesting their profits in R&D instead of frittering their money away in the nation's capital defending against real or manufactured policy battles. Imagine if every corporation stopped lobbying tomorrow and instead redirected that money toward new products or the public's interest.

That's never going to happen, obviously. But there's an argument that Apple's limited Washington strategy — naive as it may have been — is better than the alternative, which is pouring good money after bad into the dumpster fire that is modern Washington.

An Apple spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.


• Brian Fung covers technology for The Washington Post, focusing on telecommunications and the Internet. Before joining The Post, he was the technology correspondent for National Journal and an associate editor at The Atlantic.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/02/25/apples-most-glaring-weakness-in-washington
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« Reply #16 on: February 29, 2016, 05:48:51 pm »


from The Washington Post....

Google, Facebook and other powerful
tech firms filing briefs to support Apple


By ELLEN NAKASHIMA | 9:00PM EST - Sunday, February 28, 2016

An Apple iPhone 6S is displayed at an Apple store on Chicago. — Photograph: Kiichiro Sato/Associated Press.
An Apple iPhone 6S is displayed at an Apple store on Chicago. — Photograph: Kiichiro Sato/Associated Press.

MORE THAN 25 major technology firms, media organizations and civil liberties groups are filing briefs this week in support of Apple's effort to block the U.S. government from forcing the company to help unlock an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino terrorists.

Microsoft, Verizon, Facebook, Google, Amazon.com and Yahoo are among the tech and telecom giants preparing to file or join friend-of-the-court briefs, according to industry lawyers.

Those involved say the swell of support is unparalleled, especially for a case at the magistrate judge level — the lowest level of the federal court system. The filings also indicate the level of anxiety among companies about the possibility of a legal precedent greatly expanding the limits of what the government can force a company to do in criminal and national security probes.

Meanwhile, law enforcement groups and families of some of the 14 killed in the December 2nd attack in San Bernardino, California, are filing briefs in support of the government.

At issue is whether prosecutors and the FBI, citing a law that dates to 1789, can force Apple to write computer code to disable a safety feature on an iPhone recovered after the attack, which killed 14 people. The bureau wants to have a chance to crack the phone's passcode to get at the encrypted contents on the device.

But the industry is concerned.

“They know that if Apple can be forced to do this, they can be forced to do something similar,” said one industry lawyer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. He said he thought Apple's case was strong.

Today it's the phone from San Bernardino, he said. Tomorrow it might be a Microsoft operating system on a suspect's tablet. “It's ‘Write code, please, that helps us break in more easily’,” he said. “That's the headline.”

But opinions are mixed. Some legal experts said that the government appears to have the stronger case. “In general, I think that the FBI is trying to enforce a lawful order that was obtained following a warrant procedure,” said William Banks, a professor of national security law at Syracuse University.

He was referring to the court order issued less than two weeks ago by a magistrate judge in Riverside, California, demanding that Apple write code to dismantle a feature that wipes all data from a phone after repeatedly failed tries to enter a password.

Former Justice Department official Jennifer Daskal said both sides are overstating their arguments. “The government is wrong to say this is just about one case,” said Daskal, a law professor at American University. “On the other hand, it is wrong to say that if Apple loses this case, there's absolutely no limits to what the government can order a company to do” in cases involving encrypted communications.

Nonetheless, both sides are girding for a protracted court fight, one that could make it to the Supreme Court. Friend-of-the-court briefs are due by Friday, and on Apple's side, a diverse array of groups will argue that the Justice Department's order is unconstitutional, has no basis in statute and that the issue is one best settled by Congress.

One argument that companies and civil liberties groups are expected to make is that if the government's order is upheld, then the FBI might be able to order a technology firm to create, say, malicious software to send to a user's device in the form of a routine update. “That is the third rail for tech companies — to be forced to deliver a software update that breaks the security of the device,” said Alex Abdo, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which is also filing a brief in support of Apple.

Some of the companies are expected to argue that the Constitution's due-process clause prohibits the government from “conscripting” them into the service of the government to build products for them.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy group, are expected to argue that “code is speech” and that the First Amendment bars the government from forcing Apple to write code that would undo safety features it built into its devices. The media concern, industry lawyers said, is that the government could force a news organization to, say, plant a false story to lure out a suspect.

Former National Security Agency general counsel Stewart Baker said “the government isn't objecting to the message” of the phone's password, he said. “It's objecting to the real-world effect of the code.”

There are human rights concerns as well, lawyers said. If a company is forced to build software for the U.S. government, it would potentially be available to a foreign government such as China, which uses surveillance tools to monitor dissidents. Apple, the argument goes, could not refuse to allow the Chinese government access to such a tool without putting its employees in China at risk of retaliation. And if it acquiesces, dissidents and activists in China would be put at risk.

These issues are so important that they should not be left to judicial interpretation, Apple's supporters argue. “We need 21st-century laws that address 21st-century technology issues,” Microsoft President Brad Smith told lawmakers Thursday. “And we need these laws to be written by Congress.”

Daskal agreed. “These are really hard issues,” she said, “and this is really about balancing different security interests against one another.”

Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.


• Ellen Nakashima is a national security reporter for The Washington Post. She focuses on issues relating to intelligence, technology and civil liberties.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/google-facebook-and-other-powerful-tech-firms-filing-briefs-to-support-apple/2016/02/28/beb05460-de48-11e5-846c-10191d1fc4ec_story.html
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« Reply #17 on: March 01, 2016, 02:00:55 pm »


from The Washington Post....

Judge rules in favor of Apple in key case involving a locked iPhone

By ELLEN NAKASHIMA | 5:45PM EST - Monday, February 29, 2016

A judge in Brooklyn ruled in favor of Apple in a significant case. — Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.
A judge in Brooklyn ruled in favor of Apple in a significant case. — Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

A FEDERAL JUDGE in New York on Monday ruled in favor of Apple, saying that an obscure colonial-era law did not authorize him to force the firm to lift data from an iPhone at the government's request.

The ruling is not binding in any other court, but it takes on an outsize importance as the U.S. government battles Apple in a separate case in California over whether the tech firm should help unlock a phone used by one of the shooters in the San Bernardino terrorist attack in December.

The two cases involve different versions of iPhone's operating system and vastly different requests for technical help, but they both turn on whether a law from 1789 known as the All Writs Act can be applied to cases in which the government cannot get at encrypted data stored on suspects' devices.

Magistrate Judge James Orenstein in Brooklyn, who sits in the Eastern District of New York, has become the first federal judge to rule that the act does not permit a court to order companies to pull encrypted data off a customer’s phone or tablet.

In a 50-page opinion disdainful of the government's arguments, Orenstein found that the All Writs Act does not apply in instances where Congress had the opportunity but failed to create an authority for the government to get the type of help it was seeking, such as having firms ensure they have a way to obtain data from encrypted phones.

He wrote that the government's interpretation of the 200-year-old law was “absurd” in that it would authorize what they were seeking even if every member of Congress had voted against granting such authority. It would, he added, undermine “the more general protection against tyranny that the Founders believed required the careful separation of governmental powers.”

He also found that ordering Apple to help the government by extracting data from the iPhone — which belonged to a drug dealer — would place an unreasonable burden on the company.

None of the factors he reviewed in the case, Orenstein said, “justifies imposing on Apple the obligation to assist the government's investigation against its will.”

A Justice Department spokeswoman said the department was disappointed in the ruling and would appeal. “As our prior court filings make clear, Apple expressly agreed to assist the government in accessing the data on this iPhone — as it had many times before in similar circumstances — and only changed course when the government's application for assistance was made public by the court,” spokeswoman Emily Pierce said in a statement. “This phone may contain evidence that will assist us in an active criminal investigation and we will continue to use the judicial system in our attempt to obtain it.”

Alex Abdo, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said Orenstein's ruling “sends a strong message that the government can't circumvent the national debate by trying to manufacture new authorities through the courts.”

Following Orenstein's reasoning, Abdo said, “If the court rejects the government's request in New York, then the FBI's request in San Bernardino is necessarily illegal, too.”

But other analysts say that other courts could well rule in the opposite direction. In Riverside, California, Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym, at the Justice Department's request, last month issued an order requiring Apple to build software to override a safety feature in a different iPhone operating system to enable the FBI to try its hand at cracking the phone’s password.

The government had never before asked a firm to build software to undo a security feature that it had built in to protect a phone's encrypted data. In this case, the feature wipes data from the phone after 10 incorrect tries to guess the password. Experts said that once the feature was overridden, it should take about 20 to 30 minutes to crack a four-digit password. Apple fears that if it is forced to comply with that request, countless more will follow to help it unlock phones in even routine criminal investigations.

The prospect that the California ruling could go against Apple has tech firms rushing to file briefs in support of Apple by Thursday's filing deadline.

Because of the nature of the request, the outcome of the California case is more significant than the Brooklyn case, analysts say. “It has the potential to alter the landscape permanently,” said Al Gidari, a former partner at Perkins Coie who represented tech firms and is now at Stanford University.

The Brooklyn case began last fall when Orenstein, one of a handful of magistrates across the country who are activists in the surveillance debate, received the government's application to issue an order to Apple.

What seemed like a routine request — after all, this was a phone using an operating system, iOS7, that Apple had bypassed for the federal government at least 70 times before — suddenly hit a roadblock. In an October 9th ruling, Orenstein identified what he thought was a problem with the government's argument. Though prosecutors cited a 1985 decision that found that the All Writs Act is a source of authority to issue writs “not otherwise covered by statute”, he said they failed to cite another part of the decision that found that the act does not authorize the issuance of “ad hoc writs whenever compliance with statutory procedures appears inconvenient or less appropriate”.

Thus, he said, the question was whether the government was seeking to fill a gap that Congress had failed to consider, or instead sought to have the court give it authority that Congress chose not to confer.

He noted that since at least the mid-1990s, Congress has debated how far the government may go to require companies to help it with surveillance and wiretap capabilities. In fact, a 1994 law, the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act, was a compromise that applied only to phone companies and later to broadband carriers, but it expressly carved out Internet companies.

And he noted that last year, lawmakers introduced bills that precluded the government from forcing companies such as Apple from building in ways to circumvent encryption on devices. The Obama administration last fall decided it would hold off on introducing such legislation.

Thus, Orenstein wrote last fall, the drug-dealer phone case “falls in the murkier area in which Congress is plainly aware” of the lack of a law that expressly authorizes the type of help the government was seeking, and had “failed” to create or reject such a law.

Apple has said that since last October, it has received federal requests to extract data in cases pertaining to at least 15 devices, some of them using the older operating systems, and some of them running on iOS8 or iOS9. The newer systems were designed in such a way that Apple could not bypass the passcode to extract data. The San Bernardino phone ran on an iOS9.


• Ellen Nakashima is a national security reporter for The Washington Post. She focuses on issues relating to intelligence, technology and civil liberties.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/judge-rules-in-favor-of-apple-in-key-case-involving-a-locked-iphone/2016/02/29/fa76783e-db3d-11e5-925f-1d10062cc82d_story.html
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« Reply #18 on: March 07, 2016, 08:34:50 pm »


from The Washington Post....

Apple VP: The FBI wants to roll back safeguards
that keep us a step ahead of criminals


By CRAIG FEDERIGHI | 7:10PM EST - Sunday, March 06, 2016

An iPhone passcode screen. — Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press.
An iPhone passcode screen. — Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press.

AS the head of software engineering at Apple, I think nothing is more important than the safety of all of our customers. Even as we strive to deliver delightful experiences to users of iPhones, iPads and Macs, our team must work tirelessly to stay one step ahead of criminal attackers who seek to pry into personal information and even co-opt devices to commit broader assaults that endanger us all. Sadly, these threats only grow more serious and sophisticated over time.

In just the past 18 months, hackers have repeatedly breached the defenses of retail chains, banks and even the federal government, making off with the credit card information, Social Security numbers and fingerprint records of millions of people.

But the threat to our personal information is just the tip of the iceberg. Your phone is more than a personal device. In today's mobile, networked world, it's part of the security perimeter that protects your family and co-workers. Our nation's vital infrastructure — such as power grids and transportation hubs — becomes more vulnerable when individual devices get hacked. Criminals and terrorists who want to infiltrate systems and disrupt sensitive networks may start their attacks through access to just one person's smartphone.

That's why my team works so hard to stay ahead.

The encryption technology built into today's iPhone represents the best data security available to consumers. And cryptographic protections on the device don't just help prevent unauthorized access to your personal data — they're also a critical line of defense against criminals who seek to implant malware or spyware and to use the device of an unsuspecting person to gain access to a business, public utility or government agency.

Of course, despite our best efforts, nothing is 100 percent secure. Humans are fallible. Our engineers write millions of lines of code, and even the very best can make mistakes. A mistake can become a point of weakness, something for attackers to exploit. Identifying and fixing those problems are critical parts of our mission to keep customers safe. Doing anything to hamper that mission would be a serious mistake.

That's why it's so disappointing that the FBI, Justice Department and others in law enforcement are pressing us to turn back the clock to a less-secure time and less-secure technologies. They have suggested that the safeguards of iOS 7 were good enough and that we should simply go back to the security standards of 2013. But the security of iOS 7, while cutting-edge at the time, has since been breached by hackers. What's worse, some of their methods have been productized and are now available for sale to attackers who are less skilled but often more malicious.

To get around Apple's safeguards, the FBI wants us to create a backdoor in the form of special software that bypasses passcode protections, intentionally creating a vulnerability that would let the government force its way into an iPhone. Once created, this software — which law enforcement has conceded it wants to apply to many iPhones — would become a weakness that hackers and criminals could use to wreak havoc on the privacy and personal safety of us all.

I became an engineer because I believe in the power of technology to enrich our lives. Great software has seemingly limitless potential to solve human problems — and it can spread around the world in the blink of an eye. Malicious code moves just as quickly, and when software is created for the wrong reason, it has a huge and growing capacity to harm millions of people.

Security is an endless race — one that you can lead but never decisively win. Yesterday's best defenses cannot fend off the attacks of today or tomorrow. Software innovations of the future will depend on the foundation of strong device security. We cannot afford to fall behind those who would exploit technology in order to cause chaos. To slow our pace, or reverse our progress, puts everyone at risk.


Craig Federighi is senior vice president of software engineering at Apple. He first joined Apple in 1997.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/apple-vp-the-fbi-wants-to-roll-back-safeguards-that-keep-us-a-step-ahead-of-criminals/2016/03/06/cceb0622-e3d1-11e5-a6f3-21ccdbc5f74e_story.html
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« Reply #19 on: May 25, 2016, 01:00:48 pm »


from The Washington Post....

What's driving Silicon Valley to become ‘radicalized’

By ELIZABETH DWOSKIN | 5:00PM EDT - Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Larry Gadea, the chief executive of Envoy, works at his desk in his company's San Francisco office. — Photograph: Nick Otto/The Washington Post.
Larry Gadea, the chief executive of Envoy, works at his desk in his company's San Francisco office.
 — Photograph: Nick Otto/The Washington Post.


SAN FRANCISCO — Like many Silicon Valley start-ups, Larry Gadea's company collects heaps of sensitive data from his customers.

Recently, he decided to do something with that data trove that was long considered unthinkable: He is getting rid of it.

The reason? Gadea fears that one day, the FBI might do to him what it did to Apple in their recent legal battle: Demand that he give the agency access to his encrypted data. Rather than make what he considers a Faustian bargain, he's building a system that he hopes will avoid the situation entirely.

“We have to keep as little [information] as possible so that even if the government or some other entity wanted access to it, we'd be able to say that we don't have it,” said Gadea, founder and chief executive of Envoy. The 30-person company enables businesses to register visitors using iPads instead of handwritten visitor logs. The technology tracks who works at a firm, who visits the firm, and their contact information.

In Silicon Valley, there's a new emphasis on putting up barriers to government requests for data. The Apple-FBI case and its aftermath have tech firms racing to employ a variety of tools that would place customer information beyond the reach of a government-ordered search.

The trend is a striking reversal of a long-standing article of faith in the data-hungry tech industry, where companies including Google and the latest start-ups have predicated success on the ability to hoover up as much information as possible about consumers.

Now, some large tech firms are increasingly offering services to consumers that rely far less on collecting data. The sea change is even becoming evident among early-stage companies that see holding so much data as more of a liability than an asset, given the risk that cybercriminals or government investigators might come knocking.

Start-ups that once hesitated to invest in security are now repurposing limited resources to build technical systems to shed data, even if it hinders immediate growth.

“Engineers are not inherently anti-government, but they are becoming radicalized, because they believe that the FBI, in particular, and the U.S. government, more broadly, wants to outlaw encryption,” said prominent venture capitalist Marc Andreessen in a recent interview. Andreessen's firm, Andreessen Horowitz, is an investor in Envoy.


A guest registration tablet made by Envoy. — Photograph: Nick Otto/The Washington Post.
A guest registration tablet made by Envoy. — Photograph: Nick Otto/The Washington Post.

The government abandoned its effort to force Apple to help unlock the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino terrorists and paid professional hackers to crack the phone instead. But experts say the issue is far from settled, and will probably be the subject of court and legislative battles.

Start-ups are particularly wary, Andreessen said, of legislation proposed recently by Senators Richard Burr (Republican-North Carolina) and Dianne Feinstein (Democrat-California) that would compel tech companies to build technical methods to share customers' encrypted data, at a court's request.

“They believe there's this window of opportunity that if we build strong encryption now, we can make it a fait accompli. But if we let five years pass, it may never happen,” Andreessen said.

In the past two years, more companies have embraced encryption, which scrambles information so that it looks like a stream of unintelligible characters to an outsider who accessed it without permission. What's changed more recently, industry officials say, is that companies are encrypting data and throwing away the key to prevent their gaining access, a move that started with Apple but is spreading across the Valley.

This latter tactic is the most worrisome to law enforcement. Government officials have said repeatedly they do not want to outlaw encryption; FBI Director James B. Comey has called strong encryption a vital means of protecting the public's personal information from hackers.

But officials insist that there must be a technical means to access that information when companies are served with warrants. Otherwise, there will be “profound consequences for public safety,” Comey told Congress in March. Terrorists and criminals are already using messaging services to which tech companies have thrown away the key, he said. Investigators say two such services, WhatsApp and Telegram, were used by terrorists in the Brussels bombings that killed more than 30 people and wounded hundreds.

“This is a Silicon Valley delusion that the government wants to outlaw encryption,” Stewart A. Baker, a former National Security Agency general counsel, said in an interview. “I grant that there is a radicalized subculture of engineers that is very prone to that delusion, but it is a delusion.”

Surely not every company will resort to building such systems. Many simply can't. Their business relies on targeted advertising or the mining of customer data, and cutting off access would be a recipe for failure. But many start-ups that wouldn't have considered it before the Apple FBI fight are now doing so and discussing the accompanying trade-offs, said Bret Taylor, formerly Facebook's chief technology officer and now chief executive of the start-up Quip.

The trade-offs can be significant: Heavy encryption risks slowing down your service. It limits the ability to analyze customer behavior or introduce new features. (Encrypting email, for example, would make it harder to search through email.) Once you give customers the only key to their data, you can't give them a backup if they lose it.


Employees of Envoy in their San Francisco office. — Photograph: Nick Otto/The Washington Post.
Employees of Envoy in their San Francisco office. — Photograph: Nick Otto/The Washington Post.

Such efforts over the past few years have been described as part of an arms race between large tech companies and potential invaders, spurred largely by the growing threat of cyberattacks. To some extent, they've also been prompted by a newfound wariness of government after Edward Snowden's revelations about government surveillance, as well as a growing awareness among entrepreneurs of the sheer sensitivity of the data on their services.

Apple led the pack, launching end-to-end encryption with its popular messaging app, iMessage, in 2011. In 2014, the company blocked its own access to information stored on iPhones — data that disappears permanently after 10 failed passcode attempts. (End-to-end encryption enables only the partners trading messages to decode them. The companies providing the means to transmit them cannot.)

WhatsApp, the global messaging service owned by Facebook, announced end-to-end encryption this year, as did Viber, a messaging app that is popular in Europe. These years-long technical efforts predated the FBI case. Cloudera and Box, two larger tech start-ups selling data storage and processing systems to large corporations, have built encrypted systems over the past year in which only the customer has the keys needed to unscramble data.

The case between Apple and FBI and the possibility of “backdoor” legislation — mandating encryption bypasses for law enforcement — is a new inflection point. Earlier this month, Google launched Allo, a chat app that allows users to switch on end-to-end encryption, and Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos said he was exploring measures to encrypt data and throw away the keys on devices owned by the Seattle-based company.

Stealth Worker — a start-up funded six months ago by the prominent incubator Y-Combinator — provides contract cybersecurity experts to early-stage start-ups which often operate on a shoestring budget. Stealth Worker's chief executive Ken Baylor, said that in the past month, he had been approached by a half-dozen companies looking for ways to build tougher encryption and other secure technical architectures. But many don't want to talk about it, he said.

“They are afraid of a phone call from someone high up saying that they are unpatriotic,” Baylor said.

Bracket Computing, a 70-person Silicon Valley start-up, embarked on an encryption project about a month ago intended to make it easier for customers to hold the keys to their own data.

That way, “I can't get subpoenaed the way Apple did,” Bracket chief executive Tom Gillis said. “This clears up the whole issue: If you have an issue with my customer, go talk to my customer, don't talk to me. I'm just a tech guy, and I don't want to be in the middle of these things.”

Gillis said that initially, customers seeking the ability to hold the keys to their data were large, sophisticated financial services companies, such as Goldman Sachs and Blackstone. Today, a broader array of companies, including media and automotive firms and small banks, are making these requests. Advances in Intel's chips, he said, have made it possible to build these complex systems 13 times as fast as in 2010.


Employees at Envoy. — Photograph: Nick Otto/The Washington Post.
Employees at Envoy. — Photograph: Nick Otto/The Washington Post.

Building systems that cut off a company's access to customer data is time- and resource-intensive, and these systems don't come without risks.

Envoy CEO Gadea, an engineering prodigy who was hired by Google when he was just 18, estimates that his company's data-wiping project will take a few months and about three engineers working full time.

Currently, when a visitor enters a building with an Envoy registration system, a message is sent alerting the appropriate employee that they have a guest. Envoy can send such messages — by text, email or other messaging services — because the customer data is stored on its servers, which are hosted remotely by Amazon Web Services, the cloud division of Amazon. The information is encrypted, but Envoy holds the keys to unscramble it. (Amazon CEO Bezos owns The Washington Post).

Under the new protocol, the engineering team will have to reconfigure the system so that the keys to unscramble the data are kept by the customers on the iPads used to sign people in. Envoy will no longer have the ability to access the keys. The technical challenge will be making it possible for the iPads to alert people when they have visitors, instead of having the alerts come from Envoy's servers. The goal is to make the change unnoticeable to users, Gadea says, but it could take months to get there.

There will undoubtedly be many trade-offs, Gadea said. Not only will Envoy sacrifice the ability to send visitor notifications directly, but customer service also could be become more challenging. Today, if one of Envoy's 2,000 customers asks for help correcting a mistake in a visitor name or resetting a password, an Envoy customer service rep can lend a hand. Under the new system Envoy's reps could have their hands tied.

The new system could also make it harder to fix software errors because Envoy will no longer be able to push out automatic updates from its servers. And if a customer loses its passwords or keys, Envoy won't have the ability to restore the lost data. It will be inaccessible forever.

Gadea said he is not anti-government and would sell Envoy's services to the FBI if the agency wished to become a customer. “It's like with your friends,” he said, “you're always going to find one thing you don't like about them. But you're not going to hate a person because of one disagreement.”

And he said he understands the trade-offs.

“For a small startup trying to iterate quickly, it definitely slows things down,” Gadea said. “But in the long run, it's a competitive advantage and it reduces risk on our company. I can sleep better at night.”


Staff writer Ellen Nakashima contributed to this report.

• Elizabeth Dwoskin is The Washington Post's Silicon Valley Correspondent.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/05/24/what-is-driving-silicon-valley-to-become-radicalized
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« Reply #20 on: November 08, 2017, 11:25:40 am »


from the Los Angeles Times....

FBI unable to break into Texas church gunman's cellphone

By MATT PEARCE and DAVID PIERSON | 1:55PM PST - Tuesday, November 07, 2017

Maria Durand, left, and her daughter, Lupita Alcoces visit 26 crosses representing the 26 victims of the massacre at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas. — Photograph: Larry W. Smith/European Pressphoto Agency/Agencia-EFE.
Maria Durand, left, and her daughter, Lupita Alcoces visit 26 crosses representing the 26 victims of the massacre at the First Baptist Church
of Sutherland Springs, Texas. — Photograph: Larry W. Smith/European Pressphoto Agency/Agencia-EFE.


THE FBI has been unable to access the phone of the Texas church gunman, officials said on Tuesday, voicing their frustration with the tech industry as they try to gather evidence about Devin Kelley's motive for killing 26 churchgoers in a small town outside San Antonio.

“With the advance of the technology and the phones and the encryptions, law enforcement — whether that's at the state, local or federal level — is increasingly not able to get into these phones,” Christopher Combs, the special agent in charge of the FBI's San Antonio bureau, said in a televised news conference.

Combs declined to say what type of phone Kelley had, “because I don't want to tell every bad guy out there what phone to buy.”

The revelation came as investigators continued to scour the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, where Kelley fired hundreds of rounds and left behind 15 empty 30-round ammunition magazines after his attack on Sunday.

The FBI's refusal to identify the manufacturer of the phone stands in contrast to its public feud with Apple in the aftermath of the San Bernardino shooting in 2015 that left 14 people dead.

In that case, investigators wanted access to gunman Syed Farook's iPhone 5C, hoping the device would provide information about possible accomplices or terror networks.

Apple defied a court order to help crack the phone's pass code, arguing it would set a precedent that would compromise the security of billions of customers.

The FBI eventually paid a private firm $1 million to circumvent Apple, gaining access to Farook's phone and dropping its lawsuit against the tech giant.

The tension between law enforcement and the tech industry over encryption remains as high as ever.

FBI Director Christopher Wray said last month that federal agents were still seeking access to 6,900 mobile devices.

“To put it mildly, this is a huge, huge problem,” Wray said. “It impacts investigations across the board — narcotics, human trafficking, counter-terrorism, counterintelligence, gangs, organized crime, child exploitation.”

Earlier in the month, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein called on tech companies to build “responsible encryption” that would allow access only with judicial authorization.

Tech companies are wary of such requests. The government, particularly the National Security Agency, has proven to be vulnerable to hacking. And if U.S. law ultimately compels companies to provide so-called backdoors to their devices, fears abound that undemocratic countries such as China will do the same.

“Even if you solve the trust problem with the government, you then have a problem with where to draw the line” with other countries, said Robert Cattanach, a former Justice Department attorney who specializes in cybersecurity for the law firm of Dorsey & Whitney.

Cattanach said it was likely the FBI did not name the maker of Kelley's phone because it appeared unlikely that Kelley had accomplices. There was a greater sense of urgency with Farook because of concerns he might be acting on behalf of a terrorist group.

“You can't go to a judge and argue there's a future threat like in San Bernardino,” he said. “So what are you going to do? Public shaming didn't work with Apple.”


• Matt Pearce is a national reporter for the Los Angeles Times and frequently writes about violence, disasters, social movements and civil liberties. A University of Missouri graduate, he has covered news in the Midwest for a number of publications and previously wrote about technology, culture and the Middle East as a featured writer for the New Inquiry. He hails from Kansas City, Missouri.

• David Pierson covers tech, trade and Chinese investment for the Los Angeles Times. A staff writer since 2000, he previously covered food and agriculture and was based in the L.A. Times' Beijing bureau from 2009 to 2013 covering China.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • Why there's no action on guns

 • Man commits mass murder with a gun. Again. And America does nothing. Again.

 • Gunman's long slide to mass murder began when he attacked his own family


http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-texas-church-shooting-20171107-story.html
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« Reply #21 on: November 09, 2017, 12:44:10 pm »


from The Washington Post....

Texas gunman's iPhone could reignite FBI-Apple feud over encryption

The bureau has discussed the dead man's phone with Apple but so far has not made any requests.

By DEVLIN BARRETT and ELLEN NAKASHIMA | 10:25AM EST - Wednesday, November 08, 2017

Investigators at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, on November 7th. — Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images.
Investigators at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, on November 7th. — Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images.

THE FBI and Apple are bracing for another potential fight over encryption, this time because of the iPhone of the dead gunman in Sunday's Texas church shooting, according to people familiar with the matter.

The federal government and the company have shied away from open confrontation since a 2016 standoff when the locked and encrypted iPhone of a terrorist in San Bernardino, California, led to a major court battle. In that fight, the Justice Department tried to force Apple to unlock the dead man's phone. The company refused, saying to do so would create a security weakness in the phones of all customers.

That legal fight sparked a national debate about the competing interests of national security, law enforcement, personal privacy and giant tech firms. But the larger legal question of whether the government could force companies to provide access to phones and other electronic devices was never answered by the courts, because in the middle of the fight over the San Bernardino phone, the FBI found a private firm that could access it. A similar case fizzled when the suspect suddenly remembered his passcode and provided it to investigators.

On Tuesday, the FBI said it had not been able to access the phone belonging to Devin P. Kelley, the Air Force veteran blamed for killing more than two dozen people at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. Officials did not say what type of phone Kelley had, but people familiar with the case said it was an iPhone.

After the FBI said it was dealing with a phone it couldn't open, Apple reached out to the bureau to learn whether the phone was an iPhone and whether the FBI was seeking assistance. An FBI official responded late Tuesday, saying that it was an iPhone but that the agency was not asking anything of the company at this point. That's because experts at the FBI's lab in Quantico, Virginia, are trying to determine if there are other methods, such as cloud storage or a linked laptop, that would provide access to the phone's data, these people said. They said that process could take weeks.

If the FBI and Apple had talked to each other in the first two days after the attack, it's possible the device might already be open.

That time frame may have been critical because Apple's iPhone “Touch ID” — which uses a fingerprint to unlock the device — stops working after 48 hours. It wasn't immediately clear whether the gunman had activated Touch ID on his phone, but more than 80 percent of iPhone owners do use that feature. If the bureau had consulted the company, Apple engineers would likely have told the bureau to take steps such as putting the dead gunman's finger to the phone to see if doing so would unlock it. It was unclear whether the FBI tried to use the dead man's finger to open the device in the first two days.

In a statement, Apple said: “Our team immediately reached out to the FBI after learning from their press conference on Tuesday that investigators were trying to access a mobile phone. We offered assistance and said we would expedite our response to any legal process they send us.”

The two sides have sparred in the past over the first investigative steps involving an iPhone. In the case of the San Bernardino County shootings in December 2016, Apple has said the FBI squandered an early chance to get the data. The gunman in that incident worked for the county government, and the phone in question was his work phone. FBI investigators did not reach out to Apple and instead asked a county technician to reset the shooter's Apple iCloud password. That foreclosed the possibility of an automatic backup to Apple iCloud servers, which could have been accessed by investigators.


Devin P. Kelley, the suspect in the shooting at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. — Photograph: Texas Department of Public Safety/Associated Press.
Devin P. Kelley, the suspect in the shooting at the
First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.
 — Photograph: Texas Department of Public Safety.


If the FBI is ultimately unable to see the data on the phone, Justice Department officials will be faced with a choice: Is this phone worth another high-stakes legal battle with Apple?

Given the extent of the carnage inflicted by the Texas gunman and the growing problem encryption poses for law enforcement, officials could decide that it is a good test case for their argument that companies should make devices that are accessible with a signed order from a judge.

But that impulse may be tempered by another consideration: So far, it appears the gunman acted alone in what some officials have called a domestic violence problem that escalated into a mass murder.

If there is little reason to think the gunman had accomplices, the Justice Department may have a less compelling argument to try to take Apple to court to force the company to open the phone.

Since the previous cases faded, the Justice Department has shied away from direct public confrontations with Apple and other firms over encryption.

While FBI Director Christopher A. Wray has warned that there are nearly 7,000 phones that cannot be opened and said that such technologies are making it harder to fight terrorism and crime, Congress has shown little interest in tackling the issue.

Law enforcement officials argue that encryption that prevents a police officer from opening a suspect's phone even with a court order makes it increasingly difficult to solve murders and a host of other crimes. But privacy advocates say that encrypted communications protect everyone from hackers and thieves and that the government should be able to find evidence through other means.

Recently, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein has been speaking out about the issue, which the FBI has called “Going Dark”.

“Unfortunately, some companies are unwilling to help enforce court orders to obtain evidence of criminal activity stored in electronic devices,” Rosenstein said at a speech in Salt Lake City in August. “I hope that technology companies will work with us to stop criminals from defeating law enforcement. Otherwise, legislation may be necessary.”


• Devlin Barrett writes about national security, homeland security and counterterrorism for The Washington Post. He joined the newspaper in 2017 after 15 years with The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press. His first newspaper job was as a copy boy at the New York Post, and has covered law enforcement — from local cops to global manhunts — for more than 20 years.

• Ellen Nakashima is a national security reporter for The Washington Post. She focuses on issues relating to intelligence, technology and civil liberties.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/texas-gunmans-iphone-could-reignite-fbi-apple-feud-over-encryption/2017/11/08/0c2b3eb6-c48f-11e7-aae0-cb18a8c29c65_story.html
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« Reply #22 on: November 09, 2017, 12:49:41 pm »


This is how encryption works with the latest iPhones…


The encryption key is constructed by the iOS Encryption Engine processor and is composed of FOUR elements, only one of which is related to the user's passcode.

1. The DID: a Device ID: This ID is the same for all devices the IC is installed in and is burned to the Secure Enclave IC when it is made.

2. The UUID: a Universally Unique ID, an identifying code made up of unique characters assigned randomly at the time the Secure Enclave memory integrated Circuit is first burned in the silicon. No record of this ID is ever kept at the IC maker or anywhere.

3. A truly random number generated from environmental sensors such as the device's cameras, microphones, position sensors, and gps, when the user first inputs or bypasses inputing his AppleID. This too is stored in the Secure Enclave.

4. The One-Way Hash of the user's passcode (or a default number used when a user elects to not enter a passcode). This, too is stored in the Secure Enclave. Note that the user's passcode can be anything from a four to six digit number all the way to a 256 character password, which can use all 223 characters that are available on the virtual iOS keyboard. I would not recommend trying to remember a passcode of that length. LOL! However, you could if you wanted.

An algorithm, also stored on the Secure Enclave, is used to entangle the user's passcode into the concatenated UUID, DID, and Random Number (these three total 128 characters before the user's passcode Hash is entangled). In any case, the actual key is padded by the algorithm to at least 144 characters in length to do the encryption decryption EACH TIME THE USER INPUTS A CORRECT PASSCODE, although it can be longer when the user's passcode is entangled.
 
Bottom line, Apple doesn't have the ability to crack it because THEY DON'T WANT IT. They're safer from demands from the Feds that way.

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