Attorney General: We didn't need Apple to crack terrorist's iPhones – tho we still want iGiant to do it in future The US Department of Justice is once again taking Apple to task for not cooperating with device decryption requests, even after it announced that it had retrieved information from a pair of iPhones without Cupertino's help. Attorney General Bill Barr and FBI director Christopher Wray said on Monday the Feds have been able to …
"Journalist Jamal Khashoggi was beheaded and dismembered within minutes after entering the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, an audio recording leaked to a Turkish state-run newspaper indicates...
the recording indicated Khashoggi's fingers were severed during an interrogation and he was then beheaded and dismembered....Pompeo met with the Saudi royal family Tuesday to discuss the matter."
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2018/10/17/Audio-recordings-indicate-torture-dismemberment-of-Saudi-journalist/9181539783089/
If you torture somebody on a call, then its for the amusement of the people on the other end of the call.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/12/09/jared-kushner-advised-saudi-prince-after-khashoggi-murder-report-says/2257098002/
"President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner has been a promoter of Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman ...recently offered the prince advice on how to handle the outrage over the slaying of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi"
Another Trump working for a foreign government while supposedly working for the US. Just like Flynn.
There will inevitably be Quid-Pro-Quo to pay back Jared for his help in working against US interests.
Also, to the Texas oil field owners.... don't piss of the Saudi's demanding higher oil prices, because they are connected, and you cannot rely on the US to protect you anymore than Kashoggi could rely on Jared/Barr/ US protection. He pissed them off, he got murdered, Jared helped them cover for it. You piss them off, you might get murdered, Jared has some more work to do.
@"Pompeo met with the Saudi royal family Tuesday to discuss the matter [Washington Post Journalist tortured and dismembered in the Saudi Consulate]"
See what I mean Texas oil men? Pompeo working for the Saudis here....
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/18/politics/pompeo-wash-dishes-trump-investigation/index.html
"...the secretary of state faced dual investigations by the department watchdog into whether [Mike Pompeo] had staffers perform personal chores and whether he looked to circumvent Congress in accelerating an arms deal with Saudi Arabia."
It's just business. A price for your head, a price for each arm, a price for the fingers, a price for your iPhone history and your current location. Who needs checks and balances? Who needs rule of law? You understand don't you?
Left or right, it's basically anyone who isn't willing to listen to experts.
Occasionally, though, incidents like this will throw up a surprise. In this case it was the blinkered loon Senator Lindsey Graham, who started off on the party line but then swung around against a backdoor to encryption. It was fun watching him struggle with difficult technical words and concepts as he tried to explain this to his fellow Senate committee members, and fun watching them as they realised that for the first time in years he might actually be back on Planet Earth.
If it were a hardware device- hidden in the Lightening socket - it might be possible to log the owner's passcode by 'listening' to electrical noise. Heck, if the phone is in a case, a small bug with two microphones inside said case could determine the X Ys of a user's taps.
If the cops had more time, then whipping the phone apart and logging data directly from the screen digitiser might be an option. I don't know how current iPhones are built.
None of the above would require the phone's software to be compromised. These are just guesses though. This is not my area.
It could be that the methods used were expensive, unreliable or dependant on an exploit that is highly version dependant. Better to say "look we can crack this" than saying "We can't crack this" thus making iPhones the criminals phone of choice.
Hell, it would be an idea to say you could crack it, even if you couldn't, just to deter ne'er do wells (and regular folk) from using a system they can't access.
So they will keep banging on the "back door" drum in the hopes that the legislature will cave. If you can legally compel Apple to compromise their own security, the same law applies to other companies - which is ultimately the point.
The difference in the UK, is that the gov wouldn't want pesky judges offering fig leaf oversight.
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They probably got into it as soon as they got the necessary update from their phone cracking supplier. But the politics of the situation are about the principle of getting the back door, not whether they can manage without - and in particular - without, necessarily, having the physical device. Also it's about "not having to ask someone first". They like *do* to poke about secretly :-)
So why announce now? Well they think this reinforces the line that this sort of thing is "difficult" - "just look how long this has taken!" etc. Pure theatre.
Strange times these... are they not?
Note that even Fox News has come out and told people NOT to take the same anti-malarial drug as Trump as it could kill you.
For those two things to happen really does show that the world has indeed turned upside down. All we need is a 3rd miracle and the disaster will be over... (sic)
Nah, they like to pretend half the time we don't exist, and we like to pretend they totally hate and ignore us. If it suits Apple, they'll respond. If it's us picking apart their tech or decisions, it's the silent treatment - which has never stopped us before.
C.
Writing as a non-American, Apple's quote here irks me. They could remove every instance of "American" from it, and just write "people" or "company" as appropriate, and it would have effectively the same meaning, but would not offend their customers in the other 90% of the world.
The gung-ho nationalistic language used really annoys me, and seems to imply that the rest of us don't deserve the same level of privacy as Americans, when in reality privacy should be a human right for all of us.
(I realise that the US intelligence agencies regard all of the rest of us as potential enemy aliens, even those of us who speak English and are usually friends, but, ickkkkk....)
It’s well known that at least a former head of the NSA supports Apple in this: That creating a back door would overall be bad for US national security. (And the guy didn’t even care about other countries national security, or things like privacy, protection from scams etc. )
All that said... As the FBI boss, if I could decrypt phones, I would keep that very, very secret because I’d want criminals and terrorists to keep using iPhones. And if I couldn’t, I’d tell the world I could, so the criminals switch to something else.
> As the FBI boss, if I could decrypt phones, I would keep that very, very secret because I’d want criminals and terrorists to keep using iPhones.
The FBI investigates corporate espionage. Stealing commercial secrets from US companies would be easier for foreign actors if there was an undisclosed bug in the iPhone.
The USA's military power derived from its economic power. At least that is what is being taught in Westpoint these days.
It's true that geopolitics falls outside of the FBIs remit, but they have developed a good working relationship the CIA since 9/11.
I haven't seen Chris Morris's latest film The Day Shall Come yet. Apparently it's a comedy based on the farce of real-life FBI sting operations. The premise of useful idiots being cajoled into extremism by FBI agents hoping to infiltrate a nonexistent terror network sounds like classic Tom Sharpe writing about South Africa in the 80s.
Not surprising, the DOJ and FBI are lazy in that they'd rather have all the work done for them while they collecting billions in funding. For example, they've failed to act on a congressional mandate to fight child exploitation (the other favorite excuse for backdoors), and instead have capitalized on distain for big tech by convincing some congress critters to draft the EARN IT Act. It piles all the responsibility for making child exploitation content go away and lets the DOJ break encryption conditioning Section 230 immunity on following DOJ "best practices".
And that's a Good Thing (TM).
Apple is not law enforcement. If the law wants to decrypt, it pays the tech consultant the market price to do so. It does not make Apple put a backdoor in a secure encryption system.
What's next, cars that automatically call the police when criminals are driving them ? Of course not, this is just another jab at backdooring encryption by the morons who think they can just wish it so.
Luckily, they can't.
It's like talking to a brick wall because the key policy makers can often barely use technology let alone understand it. I'm sure most of us have had to deal with similar issues either at work or with family where they can't understand why the magic box can't just do everything they want it to!
I think they can, they just end up buying Cellebrite's system for unlocking iPhones. As was the case with the San Bernardino shooting, they drag their feet and loudly complain in the media and to Congress; trying to make a case for mandatory backdoors. They seemingly have little issue with the cynical use of tragedy as a vehicle for policy objectives.
Some publications have a policy of avoiding mentioning the names of murdering terrorist scumbags (merely describing them as such or in similar terms), in order to emphasise that in committing their crimes they have lost their humanity, and, although their horrific actions may sadly not be forgotten, the erasure of their name at least gives out the very strong message to wannabes, or their equally deranged followers, that they will achieve absolutely no "glory" or infamy through their pitiful actions.
The identity of the scumbag who committed the crime is irrelevant: the friends and families of the victims sadly will not forget, and although those investigating and dispensing justice will need to know, the rest of us need only know that a pathetic individual committed an awful crime, but their former human identity is unimportant and not deserving of repetition.
Perhaps The Register might wish to adopt this as an editorial policy, where appropriate?
Because it worked so well when Tutankhatenmun's handlers completely erased Akhenaten from history, right?
Don't ignore it. Instead, teach why it is wrong. (Note that I'm not commenting on the rightness or wrongness of atenism vs polytheism in ancient Egypt. It's just an example.)
"Those who forget history ..."
Fair point, jake, and interesting further information about Akhenaten, I knew that his reign had been regarded by successors as an aberration, but I didn't previously know that they had tried so extensively to erase all record.
I suppose the point I was trying to make was more applicable to the crimes of individuals, or small localised groups of people (the sort who perhaps could be dissuaded from suicide attacks if society makes it very clear that they just won't get the "glory" they seek), rather than more widespread/systematic terrorist movements (it could perhaps be argued that by the time society suffers from continual (rather than intermittent) attack from the latter, it already has a bigger problem that it needs to deal with?).
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