Apple Might Be Forced to Hand Over iOS Source Code to the FBI (theguardian.com) 273
Bruce66423 writes: In its latest filing, the FBI implies that, if the burden on Apple programmers of their alternative approach is too great, then Apple should release the whole source code to the FBI to allow them to do the work, quoting the precedent of the Lavabit confrontation. Clearly it is time for Apple to move offshore!? To recall, Lavabit abruptly shut down in 2013 when the FBI attempted to get the company to hand over the encryption keys for its secure email service. While the current situation seems to put Apple in the same ballpark as Lavabit, what gives the Cupertino-giant company an advantage is the immense support it is receiving from other Silicon Valley companies and personnel.
Many believe that the FBI doesn't really need Apple's help in unlocking the iPhone. Reports claim that the iPhone in question already has a "backdoor" which could allow the government-backed institution to access the data on the smartphone. Other widely reported theories include cracking the iPhone and manipulating the innards to trick the system into spilling out all the information. One proposed method, which requires the phone's NAND flash chip to be taken out, may not work, though. Daniel Kahn Gillmor, a technology fellow with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, pointed out the risks in playing with flash memory. He said that an error in removing the memory could make the data unreadable forever.
It's simple. (Score:5, Insightful)
The FBI doesn't want anybody to be able to keep any secrets from it ever, with no regard to what impact this might have on commerce. They are attempting to use this case to ensure that they get complete authority and ability to decrypt everything at their whim. If they can offload the work to other companies for free, all the better, but the real win is that nothing anywhere can ever be kept secret from them for any reason.
That's all this is. Everything else is just politico/legalease/bullshit.
Re:It's simple. (Score:5, Interesting)
If only there was someone in charge that could tell the FBI to stop this.
Re:It's simple. (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you signed up for the revolt? That is the only way you are going to get someone in charge who is not an authoritarian, wanting the FBI to get their way. Not a single candidate in either the Democratic or Republican party has mentioned the Constitutional protection which should exist. They have all said that the FBI should be able to do what they want, when they want, to whom they want.
In fact they have all said Safety is more important than Freedom and Government intrusion. (a couple have intentionally used double speak to try and hide it, but..)
Tyranny is frighteningly close.
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IIRC, Rubio is the only candidate to say (at least, int he debates) Apple should not acquiesce. The only other candidate to even acknowledge that there were privacy implications was Cruz, but even he hedged as said that even considering, Apple should give in. Everyone else is on the side of security theater.
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According to the Washington Post, Rubio, Clinton, and Sanders are sitting on the fence on this issue.
Translated, they're waiting until after they get their votes before letting everyone know they're going to side with the idea of the FBI having absolute authority over business.
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According to the Washington Post? Really, you can't look at their records and form your own opinion based on facts?
I don't have time to list everything you have not been told by the Washington Post about those same people.
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Duh. Because they support it but don't want to get burned for it until after they've won the election.. If they lose then they can claim the winner is. Passive aggressive political strategy. I'll bet clinton is pro fbi. she's a statist. So are the neocons.
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Just several years ago, a million people were marching in DC in protest of warrantless wiretapping. Where are those people now? Or were they not really marching in protest of wiretapping but really just against the R in front of the President's name?
Re:It's simple. (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't worry. The FBI/NSA/etc. know where all those people are now, what they are doing, and who they have been talking with. Soon, the FBI might also be able to see what's on all of their phones as well. You know, just in case any of them even thinks of doing "wrong." (Where "wrong" is defined by the FBI/NSA/etc.)
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Behold the power of MASS MEDIA! Stop thinking of R vs. D and think of "Tyrants" vs. "Society".
I believe that was GP's point.
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Are you signed up for the revolt? That is the only way you are going to get someone in charge who is not an authoritarian, wanting the FBI to get their way. Not a single candidate in either the Democratic or Republican party has mentioned the Constitutional protection which should exist. They have all said that the FBI should be able to do what they want, when they want, to whom they want.
In fact they have all said Safety is more important than Freedom and Government intrusion. (a couple have intentionally used double speak to try and hide it, but..)
Tyranny is frighteningly close.
You need to google it more... Here's the list of who's against and who's on the fence:
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
You'll note there isn't a single Democrat who's all-in for the FBI. I'm not happy that no Presidential candidate has completely supported Apple's position (because it's the constitutional position), but if either Trump or Cruz is the candidate for Republicans (90% likelihood), then I'll venture that either Sanders or Clinton will lean to the liberty side of this argument.
One other thing
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Oh really. So what crime is Apple suspected of committing? What evidence has the FBI used to establish probable cause against Apple that requires it to submit to the burden of a ....... search? Only, it's not really a search, is it? In fact, what the FBI is seeking doesn't even exist at the moment, does it?
Re:It's simple. (Score:5, Insightful)
There are plenty of places for you to educate yourself on the subject outside of Slashdot. I would strongly recommend that you do your homework in the future.
The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides, "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly ...
Demanding a company perform an action which is ILLEGAL in all other circumstances meets and exceeds the definition of abuse of power. If you want to use the common, and somewhat fallacious, argument of a safe: A safe maker may be compelled to produce a key for a safe, and reimbursed for the cost of making said key. If the safe owner modified the lock and the key does not work, the Government can NOT compel the safe maker to blow open the safe.
What the Government is demanding is not just for Apple to blow up the safe, they are requesting a permanent opening be made in ALL safes for their convenience. The only way this would meet probable cause would be to claim that ALL citizens are criminals. That last part is a violation of much more than the 4th amendment.
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The Constitution being an absolute, exhaustive list of the powers of the federal government.
Name the article and clause of the Constitution that grants the federal government the power to compel a company to create something for them. Do they have to pay for that creation? Are there any limitations on what they can request and who they can request it from?
If the government had convinced a judge that there is a body buried somewhere in Boston, could the judge have issued
Re:It's simple. (Score:4, Interesting)
Um, what constitutional protection?
The FBI went through a court, that is the extent of the protection the constitution guarentees with the fourth amendment.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized
Do you try to say that there isn't probable cause, there want an Oath or affirmation, or that the thing to be searched was not described well enough?
Not simple.
The source code is a stretch, the seizure of source code was not specified in the writ.
It is more than source code...
This would be a second pile of worms.
And I suspect interesting bits are not Apples to release.
It is not uncommon for hardware to be built with devices that are opaque without
information obtained via NDA. Files that contain offsets for registers and functions
that describe and make the device do its thing fall into this NDA world like nVidia driver
blobs in Windows and Linux.
For the FBI to work with blobs Apple would have to engineer an API and deliver binary blobs.
A single chunk of silicon can contain the IP of numerous companies.
Some are patent exchange agreements with exclusions to sell and disclose.
The complexity of patent contracts and portfolios is non trivial.
This can extend to tools and tool chains.
Apple recently chopped LLVM from some of its build tool chains read why.
Swift and other internal tools and libraries may apply.
It is likely that source is shared on many other devices so to reach in
and grab source, tools, make files and more for one device would be
a reach into all of the products: iPad, Mac, iTunes, AirPlay, Apple Watch.
The Apple ecosystem is not public. You cannot hire individuals with knowledge
of iPhone and IOS internals without their being in violation of individual NDAs.
Training... there is no external training program for internals.
A less worthy bit of hardware is the Pandaboard and obtaining
full documentation is non trivial. When Texas Instruments backed off
interesting software devel stopped. The graphics hardware IP blobs
are often the tightest in the industry and would be necessary. Radios,
network chips, USB devices.
Copyright... it took a couple years to identify all the copyright owners
in some flavors of BSD Unix and rewrite or license them. Transfer
to someone without permission could be expensive.
Most licenses are not transferable... sure if identified in open court
but most contracts have silence clauses.
Some IP might be international in origin. Can this court reach out
to compel IP from a Japanese, Korean, Chinese Canadian company.
Someone is smoking some wackey tbackey...
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Not only that but technical assistance from an entity that has done nothing wrong, and is not suspected of doing anything wrong. I may be mistaken, but suspected wrongdoing is one of the elements necessary to establish probable cause.
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The constitution pretty nearly explicitly says "Anything that isn't listed the federal government is forbidden from doing." So if you say the constitution is silent on the matter, you're saying the feds are forbidden.
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That argument only works if you think the Constitution actually means what the Constitution says it means.
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If we don't, the wrong Rigelian could win.
Delusion (Score:2)
You can vote for whoever you wish, and honestly I hope everyone does. That said, the general populace will vote for the candidate they wish too. If you believe that your vote for a 3rd party will make your 3rd party candidate the winner, I can say with certainty that you are delusional.
The majority of people vote for who they see and hear the most, and happens to be a member of the party they believe best fits their world view. You won't hear much about 3rd party candidates, and the little you hear will
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It's not as if the FBI has never blackmailed a president.
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Or Congress. This agency started its life with a leader that used blackmail as a standard law enforcement technique. The FBI should have been dismantled from the ground up when Hoover died as his ghost still haunts the agency in all it's actions.
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Or Congress. This agency started its life with a leader that used blackmail as a standard law enforcement technique. The FBI should have been dismantled from the ground up when Hoover died as his ghost still haunts the agency in all it's actions.
John Kennedy threatened to do that with the CIA, and you see where that got him...
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If only there was someone in charge that could tell the FBI to stop this.
Like who, this guy? [engadget.com] This doesn't sound very promising:
As a practiced politician, Obama avoided coming down too hard on any one side, and he said he wasn't able to discuss the ongoing FBI vs. Apple case at all. But by and large his message was that sacrificing some degree of privacy for the sake of our safety has served the country well for hundreds of years, and he expects we'll figure out a way to do so digitally as well.
Here he is pondering:
"The question we now have to ask is if technologically it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system where the encryption is so strong that there's no key or no door at all," Obama pondered, "how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot?"
I'm going to answer his question with another question: why does he think that people feel like strong encryption is necessary? If he doesn't know the answer to that, he should ask Edward Snowden. If the government only ever used its authority responsibly then we wouldn't be having this argument. Here's another gem:
As to how to balance these things Obama said we'll have to figure out "how do we have encryption as strong as possible, the key as secure as possible and accessible by the smallest pool of people possible, for a subset of issues that we agree is important."
The "smallest pool of people possible" is 1, the person who owns the data. No one else needs that key. As far as "
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If *commerce* is your first concern over privacy, you're doing it very, very wrong.
Time travel story idea (Score:2)
If you could go back in time and expose J. Edgar Hoover as a cross-dressing sadomasochist BEFORE he managed to seize control of the FBI, would it still be the same kind of power-mad agency?
I often wonder if it would be a milder government law enforcement agency with narrower authority if Hoover had been sidelined for some other bureaucrat, or if what the FBI has become is essentially an inevitability -- a byproduct of the bank robberies of the 1930s, the security panics of the 1940s, the Red Scare and antic
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If you could go back in time and expose J. Edgar Hoover as a cross-dressing sadomasochist BEFORE he managed to seize control of the FBI, would it still be the same kind of power-mad agency?
Actually, yes. The Progressive Movement is by its very nature prone to totalitarianism over time. Now if we were also able to hold off or eliminate the Cold War, and then go back to FDR's time and cut back the overreaches of the federal government that he pulled off, and then go back further to the whole Elliott Ness thing...
But you mention this yourself:
I often wonder if it would be a milder government law enforcement agency with narrower authority if Hoover had been sidelined for some other bureaucrat, or if what the FBI has become is essentially an inevitability -- a byproduct of the bank robberies of the 1930s, the security panics of the 1940s, the Red Scare and anticommunism, the cold war and the 1960s civil unrest.
Perhaps it would still be what it is, but somehow with a different tone had it not been one man's personal kingdom for 40 years, a man who scared most Presidents into leaving him alone.
It was a byproduct of the things you mention, *plus* the progressive tendency towards centralizing government. It all sort of meshes together. Even if Hoov
Dear FBI, (Score:3, Informative)
Dear FBI,
You can ALREADY start downloading OS X & iOS source code from here:
http://opensource.apple.com/ [apple.com]
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Is there a source code obfuscator?
Re:Dear FBI, (Score:5, Insightful)
Does this include Apple's signing key which is required to create a firmware image that the phone will run?
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You can start, but you won't get very far [apple.com]:
JavaScriptCore-7601.1.46.3
WTF-7601.1.46.3
WebCore-7601.1.46.10
WebKit-7601.1.46.9
WebKit2-7601.1.46.9
libiconv-44
You could compile most of a web browser.
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WTF is WTF!?
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Seems to be Web Template Framework
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iOS source should not be handed over (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's be honest, the FBI's goal isn't to access one iPhone. They want access to all encrypted communications. This should be obvious. Handing over the source code to iOS will probably allow the FBI the opportunity to look for other vulnerabilities that could be exploited to read private communications. This isn't acceptable. Furthermore, wouldn't Apple still need to cryptographically sign any build of iOS that would be loaded onto the San Bernardino shooter's phone? The FBI has carefully picked the fight in a case where there's no defending the deceased shooter to maximize public opinion being on their side. They're being disingenuous and it's obvious to anyone who's willing to look carefully at their claims. What is it that makes elected officials almost unanimously support reducing the privacy of the people when there's no such consensus among the people? And why isn't there an effort to impeach the leaders of these three letter agencies for their activities? Impeachment isn't limited to the President, and those who violate the Constitution as they do should be accountable through impeachment.
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From TFA:
“The FBI cannot itself modify the software on Farook’s iPhone without access to the source code and Apple’s private electronic signature.
“The government did not seek to compel Apple to turn those over because it believed such a request would be less palatable to Apple. If Apple would prefer that course, however, that may provide an alternative that requires less labour by Apple programmers.”
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Yes, that's they point of TFA.
The FBI threatened, in federal court, to take the source code from Apple by force.
If it were the mafia, they would be threatening knee caps. But really, potato/potahto.
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or gestapo/Gestapo
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Hey, the FBI is just giving Apple a simple offer of protection (from having their programmers forced to do a lot of work for the government for free). If Apple doesn't want to take the FBI up on their offer, then the FBI can't be held responsible if Apple's business were to suffer some sort of "accidental setback." *cracks knuckles threateningly*
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This: The FBI could give a shit about the source code. The FBI (and intel groups) want the code-signing keys so that they can sign their own malware.
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If you can't see how the FBI/NSA demanding a cryptographic signing key which has authority over hundreds of millions of devices is a big deal then I would question your judgement.
(Also known as -1 disagree)
So, the NSA & FBI can crack the iPhone . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
. . . but it's difficult and there is a danger of data loss.
So what they want, is a master key, so they can unlock any iPhone whenever and wherever they want, without a big hassle. Or a warrant. So they're claiming they can't access it, simply because they want easier access.
Well played.
Re:So, the NSA & FBI can crack the iPhone . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really - They've backed Apple into a corner. In response, Apple has only two logical next moves - Send all their platform-level development overseas ("You can thank the FBI for the loss of those 1500 highly paid American jobs"), and make the encryption truly unbreakable (absent some unknown weakness in the algorithms themselves), both at rest and in-transit.
Apple may well lose this round - But they can salt that field so deeply as to make Uncle Sam wish he'd never asked. "Gee, sorry, did we just make all your expensive Stingrays almost completely useless, boys? Oops, our bad, wink wink nudge nudge!"
Come to Canada (Score:5, Funny)
May I suggest Canada? It's nice and close, we speak English, and I bet you could buy all those empty Blackberry buildings [financialpost.com] pretty cheap.
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Where would they send those jobs? I doubt there's a foreign country with enough skilled workers whose government wouldn't make the same demands or worse. This type of BS is not unique to the US federal government.
Spaceship Campus (Score:5, Funny)
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I would personally take a job in the Philippines and continue to take my California Salary. Live like a king, fraction of the cost of living, and better quality of life with the given income level.
It wouldn't be hard to convince most of the single, male, developers to relocate overseas.
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They don't really need to send the development team overseas, just the signing key. It would suffice to require all upgrades to be signed with not only their own key but also a distinct key held by an independent and neutral third-party (or group of third-parties) outside of U.S. jurisdiction, with instructions to refuse any image-signing requests made under duress.
Of course, they should also ensure that no image other than the one already installed on the device can execute until after the device has been
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If you believe their lies about only using Stingrays to capture call metadata, I have a bridge to send you...
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That's not clear. It would certainly be a lot of trouble, but they could set it up so that new model Apple-Apple communication over the networks (including cell phone) would be unbreakable. But it would be a LOT of trouble, and I can't imagine them bothering to do so. The metadata would still be obvious, of course.
The real weakness of the current system is that if you record the initial handshake which establishes the session key, then it is *relatively* easy to decrypt things, even with otherwise secure
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So what they want, is a master key, so they can unlock any iPhone whenever and wherever they want, without a big hassle.
No, no, no, no. All they want is a key to this one phone. Honest. That such a key would also work to unlock every other similar phone is pure coincidence. That wasn't their intention. Really. Though now that you mention it ... when we are done here, we have this stack of seized iPhones we want to talk about.
Ha HA! We're an IRISH company now! (Score:5, Interesting)
Clash of the titans (Score:5, Interesting)
Thinking about the Apple situation, I noted that for years people have predicted that we would live in a corporatocracy.
And here we are, huddling in fear while giant organizations battle for our rights.
It is now too expensive for anyone except the upper 1% to go to court, so we are forced to hope and pray that some organization will take up the cause, leaving us on the sidelines rooting like sports fans.
Of course, those giant entities will only battle for our rights if it aligns with their other goals - Apple isn't opposing this out of their good nature, it's because doing it would cost the money and hurt their bottom line with future sales.
What a world we live in!
Re:Clash of the titans (Score:5, Insightful)
We need another Snowden who'll dump enough data to clearly give at least a few individuals legal standing. Or just release it all so we can have a massive class action suit involving the entire country against its own government.
Re:Clash of the titans (Score:5, Insightful)
In many cases, we live at the whims of giant corporations and our only hope is that a government agency can help us. For example, if your local cable ISP - likely your one source for wired, high speed Internet - decided to drastically cap your data rates to prevent streaming while pushing their TV services. Complaints to the ISP would go unheeded and there would be no competition to jump ship to or to help keep them honest. Only a government agency would have the power to keep them in check.
Here, though, it's reversed. A government agency has decided that they should have access to all phones all the time. (Let's be honest, that's the FBI's end game. They've all but admitted it.) What can the average person do? We can vote for other candidates, but that will only have so much of an effect. The powerful tend to know how to stay in power - even if it means subverting the voting process or corrupting new politicians. A big company (Apple) standing up to the government agency is our best hope at keeping the government agency at bay.
In either case, it's a story of two giant monsters fighting in a big city and the little people getting crushed. It's just a matter of which giant monster is on our side this time. (Next fight, it might the other way around.)
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Clash of the gnats (Score:2)
You can trivially build computer storage that the FBI can't crack. If you have $300 (remember to spend some of that on a real keyboard rather than a numeric keypad, which you get tired of using after 4 keypresses) then you have more cryptographic resources than the FBI has cryptanalysic resources. Anyone can be a titan, next to the FBI's ant-like stature. If you did that, the FBI would have no choice but to resort to the $5 wrench (and if we maintain the context of this particular case, the $5 wrench wouldn
It's not the source code that matters (Score:5, Informative)
My fault, I suppose, for being lazy.
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Oh for gods' sake. I wrote a whole comment saying basically, "I don't see the problem here," based on the worthless summary, and then looked at the article. It's not about source code, it's about the signing key. It acknowledges that right in the article title, but whoever submitted this got their head on backwards.
Well the LavaBit reference makes a lot more sense now too.
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The article title is incomplete. The article itself says it's about both the source code and the signing key:
The department wrote in a footnote to its filing: “The FBI cannot itself modify the software on Farook’s iPhone without access to the source code and Apple’s private electronic signature.
“The government did not seek to compel Apple to turn those over because it believed such a request would be less palatable to Apple. If Apple would prefer that course, however, that may provide an alternative that requires less labour by Apple programmers.”
They want to tell everyone who in charge (Score:4, Interesting)
Eminent Domain (Score:3)
It's this pretty much seizing the source "for the public good", so they'd need to pay fair market value under Eminent Domain laws?
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Yes, but given that if Apple's source code was to be placed into the hands of the US government, the value of that code would plummet -- and therefore the "fair market value" (which would be determined *by* the government) would likely be far less than it is now. Remember.. the US government has shown that even its top agencies (IRS for instance) don't have a clue when it comes to securing important information so once the FBI gets this code, it'll be in the underground "public domain" within a very short
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Yes, but given that if Apple's source code was to be placed into the hands of the US government, the value of that code would plummet -- and therefore the "fair market value" (which would be determined *by* the government) would likely be far less than it is now.
I don't think valuations work that way, or every house taken to build a freeway would be valued at $0 since once the government takes over the house and bulldozes it to build the freeway, the house would be worthless. The valuation has to be based on the market value at the time of the seizure of the property.
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The Cost of Social Responsibility (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple is attempting to be socially responsible. The cell phone is a worse instrument for oppression than Orwell ever imagined. I can make your phone record every moment that you are carrying it. I can compress your voice so well that the existing storage is just fine for that. How long do you think it will be before that's happening for governments, if we embark upon this slope?
The problem is that if you attempt to be socially responsible, the government will do its best to damage your business. Or other companies will. So, corporations have to be cowards to survive.
Ultimately, we can't rely on a corporation for hardware that we can trust. It needs to be independently verifiable. Verifying software is possible. Verifying what is in an IC, less so at present time.
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Yes, ways of taking the encapsulation off are known, and the chip can sometimes be analyzed once you do that. But that only analyzes a sample,
and it does it destructively. To verify a chip, you need to be able to verify the working one in your own device.
"Clearly it is time for Apple to move offshore!?" (Score:3)
Which country, exactly, can it go to where the government can't force the issue if it really wants to?
Ooh, ooh, I know!! They can follow Edward Snowden into the safe, comforting arms of Putunist Russia!!!
Yay!!!
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Any country cheap enough that they could buy the entire thing, government included. Apple could probably afford any of several countries, but Luxemborg would have the advantage of being a member of the EU, and thus hard to act against.
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You'd need to move all the developers there. Otherwise, one developer faced with a court order, men with guns and black fatigues and threats of instant jail for refusal could check out all the source code and hand it over to anyone with a large-enough thumb drive.
Unreadable FOREVER? (Score:3)
"He said that an error in removing the memory could make the data unreadable forever."
Well, considering that's the current state of the data, they really have nothing to lose.
Not the worst case scenario (Score:3)
FBI has it all wrong (Score:3)
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Finding people who could sleep at night after doing this is the trouble.
I so wish that were true. There are *hordes* of people who are well intentioned idiots and would do whatever people in authority tell them. Very few people have a true backbone as shown here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Regulating the wrong device (Score:5, Insightful)
The government is trying to regulate a PHONE because "terrorism" -- but of course, won't lift a finger to impose any regulation on the other, more important device used in terrorism -- the GUN itself.
So, lemme get this straight: you want to impose all these restrictions on my phone, listen to my every phone call, read every email and text message, look at pictures of my GF, and basically peer into my personal life and the personal lives of every American, all because you won't even regulate keeping an eye on someone when they buy 50000 rounds of ammo and large capacity magazines?
Dude, I have to show my driver's license to buy cold medication, but you won't even perform simple background checks when someone buys a gun?
This country is truly fucked up.
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Dude, I have to show my driver's license to buy cold medication, but you won't even perform simple background checks when someone buys a gun?
Dude, you've never bought a gun before, have you?
ha ha (Score:2)
If this is about terrorists, then why FBI? (Score:2)
While I support tech companies working with NSA (quietly), allowing the FBI to have access to source/phones/network/etc is akin to giving it to chinese gov. it will be massively abused and misused.
Good luck with that.... (Score:2)
Even if they could ever figure out how to build it, by that point it's unlikely there would be enough people still running that generation of hardware for it to matter much.
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Re:APPLE! FBI! (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh thank God. I was worried we may have a 24 hour break without this critically important story to the Slashdot readership appearing on the front page.
FTFY.
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Release the source code?
Damn... can't the FBI even use a web browser [apple.com]?
(I know, there's likely lots more to it, but damn... it's not like there's all that much hidden. I mean, you'd think the FBI were demanding source code to one of Microsoft's OS variants or something.)
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Re:handing over the code. (Score:4, Funny)
Apple should make the code available (as printed text) in a cellar with no lights, no stairs in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard."
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You need a signing key, or you can't securely issue system updates.
Or did you think anyone could write code that was perfect the first time?
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You missed that they also want Apple's signing key. That's the important part.
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