2016 US Presidential Election Thread Part V

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I think Apple is 100% wrong in the stance they've taken here.

Legally speaking anyway.
 
anitram said:
I think Apple is 100% wrong in the stance they've taken here.

Legally speaking anyway.
Click to expand...

It's not just about the one phone though.

The FBI is asking Apple to completely rewrite iOS to create a backdoor. Literally nobody's iPhone would ever be secure again if they do this because it would take the bad guys approximately 0.3 seconds to crack it.

It's the equivalent to the FBI demanding a master key to every American house's front door lock and publicly announcing where they keep it. It's stupid and blindingly unconstitutional, and Apple would be insane to agree to it. It would instantly kill their entire enterprise business (no company is going to buy iPhones for their employees if they have zero security).
 
Yeah, Apple is 100% right. This is patriot act type stuff the government is asking for, the right to invade its citizens' privacy in the name of security.
 
BigMacPhisto said:
Fox News national poll has Sanders ahead of Clinton by three points. First time that's happened thus far.
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Ummmm, it's Fox News. It doesn't all of a sudden become a reliable source when it says something you want it to say. In fact I don't think this is the first time, but I can't be bothered to look. Fox is so anti-Clinton is doesn't surprise me in the least bit.


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DaveC said:
It's not just about the one phone though.

The FBI is asking Apple to completely rewrite iOS to create a backdoor. Literally nobody's iPhone would ever be secure again if they do this because it would take the bad guys approximately 0.3 seconds to crack it.

It's the equivalent to the FBI demanding a master key to every American house's front door lock and publicly announcing where they keep it. It's stupid and blindingly unconstitutional, and Apple would be insane to agree to it. It would instantly kill their entire enterprise business (no company is going to buy iPhones for their employees if they have zero security).
Click to expand...

The legal case is considerably more complicated and the blind assertions that this is unconstitutional are generally being made by the public who doesn't really understand constitutional law.

This is a very good read, I'd encourage everyone to read it but it's fairly legalese and I will admit these sorts of things can even put a lawyer to sleep. But very interesting and well thought out.

Apple is Selling You a Phone, Not Civil Liberties: https://www.lawfareblog.com/apple-selling-you-phone-not-civil-liberties
 
bono_212 said:
68% Conservative.

Your description sounds about on point with my political views as well.

And, yes, I have OCD and mild germaphobia. This test seems kinda...odd, to say the least.
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Exactly that's the weird thing about this survey. Of course I'm going to be grossed out by maggots on meat!


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ntalwar said:
It looks like the lead author is ex-NSA, so it seems biased.
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Have you read anything beyond her biography?

The issue I have with this case is that people seem, by and large, unable to separate what the actual law is versus what they think the law should be. Reasonable people can argue about the current state of the law and whether it should be the case that private enterprise can be compelled to assist the government in this (potentially invasive) way. But that is a discussion separate and apart from whether the law applies today and whether interpretation of the constitution permits for it. That is where I and seemingly most people on this board disagree. That is why you have professors like Dershowitz clearly saying you have to permit for reasonable exceptions of privacy. I've said nothing of what I think should be the state of affairs.

And let's also not pretend like Apple is doing this to fight for our freedoms. It's about money for them.
 
DaveC said:
It's the equivalent to the FBI demanding a master key to every American house's front door lock and publicly announcing where they keep it. It's stupid and blindingly unconstitutional, and Apple would be insane to agree to it. It would instantly kill their entire enterprise business (no company is going to buy iPhones for their employees if they have zero security).
Click to expand...


This is not quite true. Codes more complicated that four-digit numbers would still be essentially impossible to break.

Breaking the encryption is NP-complete, which basically means that there's no way to do it (barring proof that P=NP, which nobody thinks to be true) other than literally trying every combination. iPhones only let you try ten combinations before destroying the encrypted data; that function is that the FBI is asking Apple to disable. And only for this phone, although maybe that could arguably be used more commonly in the future.

But the brute-forcing thing is important, because iPhone PINs don't have to be four-digit numbers. There are only 10^4 = 10,000 possible combinations for a four digit code, and it won't take the FBI very long to get the right one. Say they can try ten per second, it'll take 1,000 seconds = 17 minutes.

iPhone passcodes can also be much more complicated. An eight digit numerical code would have 10^8 = 100,000,000 combinations, taking 10,000,000 seconds, or about 115 days. Still doable for a determined FBI, I guess, but less likely to be worth their time. And every number you add doubles the time.

Or you can do as I do, a 15 digit code with letters (capital and lowercase), numbers, and symbols. Each character can be one of roughly 80 options, meaning that there are ~80^15 possible combinations. That's about 35,184,372,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 combinations (to as much precision as Google will give me). Or about 111,568,910,000,000,000,000 years at ten tries per second. Which is about 8,073,003,762 times the age of the universe.

So, the moral of the story is that iPhone data can still be effectively encrypted with a longer/more complicated passcode, which would be for all intents and purposes impossible for the FBI to break, even with the patch that they're asking for.


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The thing is... Apple can do it... but what happens the next time the FBI comes knocking on the door with another phone? "Just this one time" is a super weak argument.
 
LuckyNumber7 said:
The thing is... Apple can do it... but what happens the next time the FBI comes knocking on the door with another phone? "Just this one time" is a super weak argument.
Click to expand...

Writing the special software may not be easy for Apple (for iOS 8/9). In the past, Apple complied with requests 70 times (for prior iOS versions) with weaker encryption. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a good technical write-up.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/technical-perspective-apple-iphone-case

A couple of points that were under-reported are that it was a work cell phone (the personal one was destroyed), and that the passcode was changed sometime after the government had the phone in its possession.

I agree that the FBI and foreign governments could request the same backdoor, even as a condition for selling phones in their countries.

Regarding the legal issues, the ACLU is on Apple's side:
https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-comment-fbi-effort-force-apple-unlock-iphone
 
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mikal said:
Of course I'm going to be grossed out by maggots on meat!


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Click to expand...


Well if you're not grossed out by maggots you might be tricked into voting for one :shrug: The Trump campaign ran a similar poll prior to running to make sure he could find enough minions.


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LuckyNumber7 said:
The thing is... Apple can do it... but what happens the next time the FBI comes knocking on the door with another phone? "Just this one time" is a super weak argument.
Click to expand...

As I understand it they aren't even asking for "just this one time". They're asking for software to be written to be able to access any iPhone whenever, without having to go through Apple anymore.

That's a bad enough idea in the FBI's hands, what are less scrupulous governments going to do with access to their citizens' data like that? Like I said, once the back door is built in it's going to be cracked more or less immediately.
 
DaveC said:
As I understand it they aren't even asking for "just this one time". They're asking for software to be written to be able to access any iPhone whenever, without having to go through Apple anymore.



That's a bad enough idea in the FBI's hands, what are less scrupulous governments going to do with access to their citizens' data like that? Like I said, once the back door is built in it's going to be cracked more or less immediately.
Click to expand...


That was initially the case, but news updates suggest the FBI has "settled," so to say. Where they basically want apple to write the firmware for just ONE phone and then Apple can keep the software and not distribute it.
 
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