If this whole thing has been an exercise in: “OH NO! WE CAN’T CRACK iPHONES! I SURE HOPE THE TERRORISTS DON’T FIND OUT. ” then I will be impressed. Unfortunately, the alternative explanation that they wanted a precedent and are backing out when the precedent is going to go against them is more plausible. Or the explanation that they are the Keystone Kops.
Yeah, I wish the court would still rule on the case. Where I live there is a board that settles land use planning disputes that has a history of actually ruling on cases after they have been dropped and often awarding costs. I wish this was more normal. It seems like if the government wants to drop a case because they were wrong about their reasons for filing it, they should at least have to pay the legal fees of the defendant.
I’m… pretty darn sure… that the Feebees are issuing this statement to cover their walk-back from a legal fight they were almost certain to lose.
Maybe hoping to come back again when Trump, Cruz or some other goose-stepping little tin fascist becomes President/Czar or whatever our nation’s uncertain future holds.
“Not much is known, but this much is certain: time will tell.” - well-known journalist
For some reason it had not occurred to me that one reason Apple might be fighting this so hard (when apparently there are workarounds that would allow the phone to be accessed without them) isn’t so much for legal precedent or to avoid having New York send them a couple hundred phones to crack. It might be because they don’t want their customers to think they can send them their phones after they forget their password and get all their data back.
The FBI has a search warrant. The person that crafted the technique demonstrated to the FBI does not.
Does having a search warrant mean an officer can commit a crime while searching your home? I would hope not.
Fair, but knowing how to commit a crime is not illegal, nor is sharing that knowledge with law enforcement (at least not in general).
You need to define your terms more carefully. What do you mean by “crime”? Officers can bust down your door, crack a safe, confiscate property, destroy property to conduct various tests, compel you to provide blood or hair or DNA, and shoot you if you try to fight them off even though defending yourself would normally be perfectly legal if anyone else tried to do these things.
Yeah and this shows the FBI’s fear that this lawsuit is really based on, because clearly the 6 and 6s are locked down with user encryption more properly … and you bet your sweet butt that Apple is gonna lock it down even further in the 7 and beyond after this.
End state, Apple will say “we can’t retrieve the customer info from this phone, it is literally impossible for us to do that” and it’ll be the truth.
But isn’t it more scary that the FBI doesn’t need Apple? That the iPhone will then be easy for them to hack let alone hack anyones iPhone they choose? Might it have been better that Apple unlocked it so that Apple has control over the process? Then Apple can destroy the program or whatever method they use to unlock it? With their “security updates” or whatever the heck they do? Now I feel that Apple has no idea what methods they are using to hack into the iPhone. Hmmmmm.
All of this paints a pretty clear picture: the leading theory at present, based on all of this, is that an external forensics company, with hardware capabilities, is likely copying the NAND storage off the chip and frequently re-copying all or part of the chip’s contents back to the device in order to brute force the pin – and may or may not also be using older gear from iOS 8 techniques to do it. The two weeks the FBI has asked for are not to develop this technique (it’s most likely already been developed, if FBI is willing to vacate a hearing over it), but rather to demonstrate, and possibly sell, the technique to FBI by means of a field test on some demo units.
This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, as it’s a fairly straightforward technique. It’s also a technique that wouldn’t work in an A7 or newer iPhone that has a Secure Enclave. More importantly, this technique wouldn’t work at all had Farook used a complex alphanumeric passcode. The weak link in all of this has been Farook and his poor choice of security.
Breaking the file system encryption on one of NSA/CIAs computing clusters is unlikely; that kind of brute forcing doesn’t give you a two week heads-up that it’s “almost there”. It can also take significantly longer – possibly years – to crack.
The funny thing about McAfee is that the method he described for breaking into the phone would have worked on phones from 10 years ago (as I’ve done exactly as he described to an old Moto v360).
He literally may have been off the grid for 10 years, and doesn’t know any better.
