Elspeth

jungmark said:

singularity said:

Saying you will quit if x happens is very easy. Quiting when x happens is a different proposition especially when it means giving up a job with benefits etc

They are high demand workers. Someone will hire them. 

Likely before the ink is dry on their resignation letters

JeffA2 said:

icoco3 said:

Beyond the sanctity of my data is the fact I have full confidence in the security of my iPhone.  I do not have to fear theft of my private data.  Moreover, I store passwords, credit card info, bank info, personally identifiable data i.e. SSN, Doctor info, etc.  It is more than just securing a few photos.

Your personal information has always been searchable with a warrant because it was in plain site (on paper, etc) but now it can be stored in an electronic vault that can not be opened.  They still can subpoena records from the phone company, bank, etc.

The 4th amendment may allow them to perform the search, but the 5th says I do not have to assist them.

My house has all those items too (passwords, credit card info, bank info, personally identifiable data i.e. SSN, Doctor info, etc.). And they're not in plain sight. But it's still searchable under warrant. So what's the difference with the phone? Why should data on your phone be beyond the reach of a legal search when that same data is in scope if it's stored elsewhere?

The data is not beyond the reach of the police...the ability to read the data is.  Search warrants do not make something that is unreadable suddenly readable.  Further, search warrants do not allow the police to force someone to do anything.  If Apple had the data the police wanted, Apple would have to turn it over.  And Apple has turned over every piece of data that they do have for this phone, such as backups.  But Apple doesn't "have" software to make the phone do what the police want the phone to do, the police want to make Apple make the software for them.  Search warrants do not allow that...the All Writs Act doesn't allow the police to do that.

The case is going to the U.S. Supreme Court in the end.  If USDOJ wins, by that time all the information on the phone will be useless due to age (as it probably already is), but everyone in the US and lots of people around the world will have been irrevocably harmed.  Drug manufacturers will be forced to make death penalty drugs they don't want to make, because lethal execution is legal, but if the government doesn't have the drugs it cannot be carried out.  Regular Citizen Joe will be forced to spy on his or her family members or neighbors, because they trust him.  Regular Citizen Jane could be forced to prostitute herself to a suspected terrorists to let the feebs get recordings of the guy and they cannot get close but she can cause he fancies her.  Heck, I could even see the reach of the AWW under the theory put for buy the USDOJ to require Citizen Joe to kill someone at the behest of the government because Citizen Joe can get close enough to the person the government wants dead.

There is no limit to the reach of the government to force you to do that which you stridently oppose if the USDOJ wins this case.

But I struggle to understand the sanctity of the phone versus every other form of information storage. With proper judicial review your personal information has always been searchable. That includes bank accounts, phone records, computer hard drives, tax records, business records, email, written correspondence, photographs -- virtually anything. In the US, the only thing that stands between you and a search of any of these items is the 4th amendment which requires probable cause for the issue of a warrant.

So why is a photo stored on my phone unsearchable under warrant, while the same photo in an old-fashioned slide-carousel in my basement can clearly be searched for cause? The only plausible difference between a phone and other media is that modern phones amalgamate a wide variety of information in the same place. But so does my house and, given probable cause, the government can get a warrant to search that. So why not my phone? 

The ability of the government to search -- given probable cause and judicial review -- is not despotism. It's the basis of law enforcement. It's how we catch rapists and killers and financial fraudsters and terrorists too. It's always true that such powers can be seen as targeting the law-abiding as well as the criminal but it's not possible to avoid that. That's why it's always a balancing act between personal privacy and civil society. Advocates for absolute privacy in the digital domain seek to fundamentally alter that balance in ways that are unprecedented.

It is incredibly frustrating to hear people making this specious argument over and over.  Search warrants are used to seize property during criminal investigations.  They also give judicial permission to the law enforcement agency seizing the property to examine the property and use the property as evidence against a criminal defendant.  A search warrant was not even required in this case because the phone is not owned by the criminal...the phone is owned by a government agency.  That agency simply consented to the seizure of the property and the search of the seized property.  Search warrants are IRRELEVANT to this case.

A photo stored on your phone is NOT unserchable under a warrant (Riley v. California) if the police can access it the police can search it once they have a warrant.  However, YOU cannot be compelled to unlock your phone...not even with a search warrant...because that violates the 5th Amendment (the case law is all over the place on why, but lets just say it boils down to the act of entering a password on a phone or any device as being equivalent to making a statement that you own the phone and its contents...which is a statement of self-incrimination you cannot be compelled to make.)

A photo stored on an encrypted phone is not the same as a photo slide stored in a carousel in your basement...the photo carousel is not encrypted.  Now, if you had a safe in your basement that was impossible to open under any circumstances without your personal passcode and the photo carousel was inside that safe you start to get equivalent.  If you were dead and there was no way to open the safe, then the police can seize the safe they just cannot open it...cause you are dead and the information needed to open it died with you.  If they, law enforcement, figure out how to open the safe without the passcode, they are allowed to do so...through what ever means they deem necessary, including destroying the darn thing.  What they cannot do is unilaterally force another person, against their will, to open the safe just because the police have a warrant.  Warrants do not, and cannot, compel a person to do a thing they do not want to do, warrants are limited to allowing the police to physically collect and inspect evidence.

I simply do not understand why people cannot comprehend that this is not about whether the police can seize the photo in the first place.

Lets put it in more simply terms.  You are a terrorist.  You want to write secret notes to your co-conspirators that no one but you and they can read.  To do this, you devise a wholly new language that no one but you and your co-conspirators know (lets call the new language gibblefritz).  You write your diabolical plans down on paper in this new language.  You send unencrypted emails in this new language to you co-conspirators.  The police figure out you and your co-conspirators are a terrorists and they decide to arrest you, however, during the attempt to arrest you, all of you are killed.  When the police search your corpse and your conspiracy hang-out, after getting a search warrant, they find your written diabolical plans in your pockets and in filing cabinets in the hang-out.  They also find the emails on your computer. 

There ends the power of a search warrant.

The police are desperate to read your missives to learn whether they killed all the terrorists or if there are others they don't know about...but they cannot because everything is in gibblefritz and the police don't read gibblefritz...no one reads gibblefritz.  Now the police know that over at the University of  Apulosi, Dr. MacIntosh is really really good at deciphering dead languages.  So they take your gibblefritz writings to Dr. MacIntosh and they say "Dr. MacIntosh, please help us, please translate these writings."  Dr. MacIntosh says "I am so sorry, but I just cannot.  I don't have time.  I'll have to write a whole new program for my deciphering computer.  I don't have resources to do that and it will take a really long time to do.  Helping you will sully my reputation.  Helping you will undermine all my other work.  No one will trust me if I help you.  I don't want to learn to read the evil language of gibblefritz, anyway."  So, the police go to to court and the beg the judge "Please, you honor, make Dr. MacIntosh help us read these diabolical writings.  Don't listen to his excuses.  The people are in danger, there may be other terrorists out there.  The world will end if we do not find them.  The world will end if we don't learn how to read gibblefritz.  Give us a Writ to make Dr. MacIntosh do as we want."

This case is not about search warrants.  Never has been, never will be. Its about whether a court can order a person (corporations are people too, Citizens United v FEC) to make something, from scratch, that they don't want to.  The All Writs Act has never before been used in such a manner and the cases cited by the USDOJ do not support their position that it does (those cases required the phone company -the Bell Telephone Co, i.e. Ma Bell, and later ATT - to given the police the "pin registry" they already had in their possession for billing purposes so the police could see who the criminals were calling, or required the phone company to allow the police to install government owned listening devices on the lines for certain telephone numbers.)  Now if the feebs have software in their possession already that they want to install on the phone themselves, but need Apple's help to do so, the AWW *might* reach far enough to force Apple to help, to the best of their ability, with the installation.  But the feebs don't have the software, they want to turn Apple in to a slave to their desires that such software be created.  If they are allowed to do that with Apple, then every person in the country can be conscripted against their will to do the bidding of the government no matter how much it will harm us personally.

I think your interpretation of the AWA is suspect but that's a matter for others. Your conclusion, however, is alarming. While I support the DOJ's original court order, I would be opposed to Apple turning over its encryption keys. Doing so places every current phone at risk of a man-in-the-middle attack. I would be surprised (and horrified) if a court found that risk acceptable. The DOJ's original approach is far short of that and they have cited relevant (so they think) precedent for using the AWA to compel the creation of code. That's where the court fight will play out.

That is exactly what the AWA allows...for a person to be required to turn over what they already have. It is superior to a straight subpoena because there are defenses to a subpoena for turning over things like trade secret. Had the judge ordered the surrender of the source code and keys Apple would have little in the way of argument. 

But the source code is already on every phone running the iOS already. The feebs, in going this route silently admit they are not as sophisticated as they should be since they don't already have hackers hacked in to the code. 

Technologically speaking, the County of San Bernardino is seriously at fault here. There should be no court case over this particular phone because if the County was using the built in administration features properly, or the software they purchased a license for this phone for, the County sysadmin could deactivate the wipe feature remotely and could prevent the user from changing that setting (and I know this to be true because I wrote the policy for my own company and know how those features work on iOS and Android and work closely with our technology distribution and management teams...when his story broke we confirmed that we had control of our own devices through our security policies and proved it on live devices...and BYOD was promptly ended.)

MEIavecchia said:

Let's put this in terms you Apple sympathizers will understand.
An awesome new company has just invented an encrypted physical key to a physical encrypted door to some child molesters creepy basement.
Impervious to any locksmith and of course any court orders to open it with a warrant to search for your missing son or daughter that the government believes might be inside or might contain clues as to the whereabouts of your child. Now do you get it? Simpletons
Apple helps terrorists!

Oh do go away. The child molester argument is BS. It's about as lame as the Hitler argument. 

If Apple ALREADY HAD THE SOFTWARE IT COULD BE FORCED TO TURN IT OVER BUT SINCE THE SOFTWARE DOESNT EXIST THE AWA IS NOT APPLICABLE. shouting is necessary because your to thick to get it otherwise. 

If the safe manufacturer had the key they could be forced to give it over. But if they make the safe and then let the owner make the impossible to hack key (which is what the passcode/password does) then the manufacturer cannot be forced to make a new key that it never made in the first place. The AWA doesn't reach that far

and the case law the feebs are relying on, the pin registry and eavesdropping cases, are not applicable. In those cases Ma Bell was not being forced to make new technology for the feebs. They were being forced to turn over existing information, the pin registry, and allow the feebs to install GOVERNMENT equipment on the line to wiretap. Neither set of cases does what this moron judge did, require a business to create a new product against their will which would undermine their business. 

Apple supports terrorism about as much as the Pope does. The U.S. Government does support terrorists and has done so for the better part of 50 years (giving guns to the drug cartels in Mexico, giving guns and money to the South American cartels in the 80s, supporting Saudia Arabia, the list is endless.)