From NPR’s David Greene interview with counter-terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke:
GREENE: So if you were still inside the government right now as a counterterrorism official, could you have seen yourself being more sympathetic with the FBI in doing everything for you that it can to crack this case?
CLARKE: No, David. If I were in the job now, I would have simply told the FBI to call Fort Meade, the headquarters of the National Security Agency, and NSA would have solved this problem for them. They’re not as interested in solving the problem as they are in getting a legal precedent.
GREENE: Wow, that sounds like quite a charge. You’re suggesting they could have just gone to the NSA to crack this iPhone but they’re presenting this case because they want to set a precedent to be able to do it in the future?
CLARKE: Every expert I know believes that NSA could crack this phone. They want the precedent that the government can compel a computer device manufacturer to allow the government in.
Though Clarke hasn’t worked for the government since 2003, he is widely respected and, I suspect, maintains enough ties within the intelligence community that he knows of what he speaks.
One side point: There’s been a lot of discussion about the possibility of the FBI compelling Apple to turn over their source code. My gut tells me, that move is coming.
Nothing bad could come from the FBI having the source code, right? Clarke is right. This has nothing to do with getting into this one iPhone. It’s all about precedent to do it whenever they want.
This confirms my thought and this is becoming scary! If I remember we went through something like this back in the day with computer back doors fight!
The issue with cracking encryption is that proving the encrypted contents are what you say can get tough, especially if you don’t want to reveal how you broke the encryption. Having the NSA simply break the encryption and trusting them implicitly that the devices contents are what they say they are could be a dangerous precedent.
Belief ≠ Proof
If Clarke and others actually had proof, they would show it. Nobody has said they know for sure, except Snowden, and even he hasn’t shown any actual proof of AES 256 bit encryption being decrypted.
Yeah, but the good news is that it totally takes LEO out of the equation. Nothing touched by the NSA is ever going to be admissible in court. I’m not afraid of the spooks, if you attract their attention you’re done anyway, but all those drooling DAs drooling over being able to unlock iPhones with a phone call to a judge makes me nervous.
Getting the source code is a pipe-dream. That would lose 8-0 in SCOTUS. Even Alito and Thomas would balk at seizing a company’s, extremely valuable, IP.