Apple vs FBI has become a national debate

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The New York Times:

Despite the fears about terrorism, the public’s concern about digital privacy is nearly universal. A Pew Research poll in 2014 found more than 90 percent of those surveyed felt that consumers had lost control over how their personal information was collected and used by companies.

The Apple case already seems to have garnered more public attention than the Snowden revelations about “metadata collection” and programs with code names like Prism and XKeyscore.

And:

Now, people are beginning to understand that their smartphones are just the beginning. Smart televisions, Google cars, Nest thermostats and web-enabled Barbie dolls are next. The resolution of the legal fight between Apple and the government may help decide whether the information in those devices is really private, or whether the F.B.I. and the N.S.A. are entering a golden age of surveillance in which they have far more data available than they could have imagined 20 years ago.

“It’s an in-your-face proposition for lots more Americans than the Snowden revelation was,” said Lee Rainie, director of Internet, science and technology research at Pew Research Center.

Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said: “Everyone gets at a really visceral level that you have a lot of really personal stuff on this device and if it gets stolen it’s really bad. They know that the same forces that work at trying to get access to sensitive stuff in the cloud are also at work attacking the phones.”

Terrific piece. This is a rare policy story that is emerging as national water cooler conversation.



16 thoughts on “Apple vs FBI has become a national debate”

  1. “Visceral” is how this issue needs to be presented for most consumers to appreciate the dangers in allowing the FBI to have its way.

  3. That doesn’t have anything to do with making Apple create a hacked iOS for the FBI to use to peek any time it wants into our phones behind the encryption. That deals with sharing of information between the NSA and the FBI from stuff the NSA already has gathered via its (admittedly questionable) sniffing stuff that is out there and travelling around the internet and airwaves.

  5. I don’t have to ship you any drugs. It says right in the article that you linked to:

    “lthough the NSA is technically tasked with surveillance of communications involving foreigners, information on US citizens is inevitably sucked up, too. The FBI is then allowed to search through that data without any “minimization” from the NSA—a term that refers to redacting Americans’ identifiable information unless there is a warrant to justify surveillance on that person.”

    “The FBI enjoys privileged access to this information trove that includes e-mails, texts, and phone call metadata that are sent or received internationally.”

    That is an entirely different thing than what this case you are calling “moot” is; that the FBI wants a special iOS without a 10-passcode entry limit before deletion and code for entry of passcodes via cable instead of touchscreen entry so that it can guess the passcode and unencrypt whatever is on the phone. What you linked to is talking about stuff sucked up from the internet and the airwaves by the NSA, both encrypted and unencrypted, and shared with the FBI.

    Whatever drugs you are on,you can keep them to yourself. OR, stated in a way you might understand:

    KEEP your DRUGS to YOURself, PLEASE!!!!!!1!!

  6. Ok… So have you noticed in your purusal of different feeds across the wires, that the FBI and the NSA and the FISA courts have ALWAYS followed the letter of the legal opinion, regardless of it’s source, passed their way to follow ??

    The FBI and their pals DO WHAT THEY WANT REGRDLESS OF WHAT OTHERS SAY. ASK JOHN YOO. The Bush’s and Cheeeeney’s of the world didn’t like what they were getting back so they tried to make up their own rules. That’s what the NSA and FBI are doing TODAY !! Making up their own rules and to hell with all of us..

  7. They can make up all the rules they want. Apparently they still can’t decrypt today’s encryption (at least in the FBI’s case; if the NSA can it isn’t sharing it with Director Comey). If they could, they wouldn’t be asking for this special broken version of iOS and they wouldn’t be trying to force WhatsApp to give them a key to their encryption. The most they are going to do is break phones and software made by US companies and ruin our tech economy, but all this chicken little shouting of “MOOT” and “REGRDLESS” and whatever is just sound and fury signifying nothing. You’re conflating issues that are only tangentially connected.

  8. And if you truly believe that Comey is telling you / the public the whole story OR the truth then we’ll just stop here.

  10. “Every expert I know believes that NSA can crack this phone.”

    Believing it and knowing it are two different things.

    I can believe certain security people saying they could remove the flash storage, copy it, and then begin trying to brute force the passcode to decrypt, replacing the copy every 9th try, before I’ll believe without evidence that someone has been able to decrypt Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256-bit encryption used on iOS, Android, and other things like WhatsApp and the rest. (Without getting lucky because someone had an easy to guess passcode/encryption key.)

  11. See, that’s tinfoil hat stuff. Without proof that they can decrypt 256-bit encryption, I will stick to the evidence that I see:

    1. Comey is asking for Apple to break the iOS so the FBI can guess the passcode to get into the phone. Occam’s Razor says this means they cannot just pull the data off the chip and decrypt it

    2. Comey has said the NSA has not given them the means to decrypt the data, so either the NSA cannot do so or isn’t sharing. In the case of what we are talking here, that amounts to the same thing and your original statement that this is all moot is not correct.

    3. Comey has now asked WhatsApp for a key to their encryption which uses the same or a similar standard to iOS. Therefore, again, the FBI cannot simply decrypt 256-BIT AES.

    It is okay to keep eyes open and stay vigilant, moving to 512 and 1024-bit encryption as computers become more powerful and faster at brute forcing these things. (Who knows what we will be able to do when quantum computing truly hits.) It does us no good to put on tinfoil hats and run around like Chicken Little crying that we are all doomed anyway so nothing is worth fighting for or watching.

  12. I’m glad you’re calm… You’re one of the last remaining voices behind the evidence curve.. That’s ok… It’s only Monday !!!

  13. I don’t think I’m the last. I’m in pretty good company, including many crypto experts like Matt Blaze and others. Even the MIT expert who testified on behalf of Apple at the congressional hearing said she believed the NSA could get information from the phone, but wouldn’t/didn’t speak to actual decryption and rather seemed to imply what Representative Issa spoke to: copying the data and doing a procedure to eventually go through the 10,000 possibilities of a 4-digit passcode.

    Maybe we’ll have this all figured out by Tuesday, though. 🙂

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  16. I admire your tenacity, and I definitely appreciate Clarke’s statements on the true reason for the FBI pursuing this case and other interesting comments he gave beyond his belief about the NSA and cracking the phone or the actual encryption.

    It’ll be Wednesday here in about 45 minutes Time marches on. 🙂

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