"""
That's because unlocking the iPhone was never about this case.
It was about putting Apple in the position of unlocking every iPhone that the government will ever want unlocked now and into the future because if you do one you have no argument against doing the next one.
And to make sure that all iPhones now and into the future can be unlocked.
There, does that make more sense?
"""
That's really all this is about.... setting precedent and pushing legal events down a logical path that'll eventually lead to a judge ruling Apple must make backdoors into all future iOS versions. They have to push hard to get a favorable ruling quickly before everyone updates to the new iOS that Apple can't unlock at all. Because by then they'd have a much more difficult legal argument to make.
And that's why, god bless 'em, good defense attorneys are the real safety net for all our freedoms, no matter how many guilty clients they get off.
Logically speaking, circumstances have allowed for the outcome of this case to be aided by iPhone data. Practically speaking, the reason they're pushing so hard in this case is because the guy is utterly indefensible -- he's a guilty-pled drug distributor, and there are undoubtedly few who would defend him. Just as sure, there are people somewhere who would prefer justice be meted as painfully as possible, and anyone who defends this guy would be a pariah in their eyes, but sticking up for the rights and fair treatment of the guilty is the greatest thing you can do to assure your own rights and fair treatment in the future.
What's so indefensible about distributing drugs—meth in this case? If the defendant had been a doctor, and a customer^W patient said the right magic words about behavioral problems they were experiencing, desoxyn is legal to prescribe for ADHD.
I have no love for meth, and I have no love for street drugs with their unknown purity and potentially toxic adulterants, but asserting that the defendant is indefensible smacks of a pro-drug-war bias that mystifies me.
GP probably meant indefensible in the context of the law, not as a moral opinion. Defendant wasn't a doctor, customer wasn't a patient, and magic incantation was not uttered, therefore it was illegal under current laws.
What he pled guilty to was illegal, but that's irrelevant to indefensibility because he pled guilty.
Saying that he is utterly indefensible is saying that, because he is guilty of something illegal, instead of losing some freedoms, laws and rights no longer apply at all. Although we have no evidence of anything else to charge anyone with (which legally we need to conduct a search), we might find something if we can look. That's illegal and immoral, but we can and no one will stop it because they don't want to be seen supporting him. That seems to be the sense of indefensible meant.
The crime and it's result is one thing. Setting a precedent for free-range witch-hunts is another; those have a bad history.
I mean to the community at large, many of whom might point at the failed war on drugs as something the government got wrong, but still want to castigate the guy "distributing meth to the children".
To capture what I meant, I should probably have said "because the guy is utterly indefensible ... in the eyes of most."
The point though is that it is those cases in which everybody (or enough of everybody) agrees that the defendant is "bad" and must be "punished" that our rights take the biggest hit, because so few object to a warrantless search executed on a guilty meth distributor, or pedophile, or terrorist, or whatever other bogeyman is accepted as belonging 100% to the out-group.
"This arstechnica comment has it spot on and is tagged as Readers Fav:
"
No, it doesn't.
I know it's a great conspiracy theory, but it's not really likely.
It's actually significantly more likely they want to unlock the phone to try to get more evidence against the other 6 people he was charged with, probably because it's lacking.
Federal prosecutors, whatever you think of them, are generally not dumb. They know this is not the strongest argument they can make, and so if they really didn't need the evidence, they would drop it and make the argument in a context that wasn't trivial.
Seriously. They deal with tons of drug offenses every day. So do the judges.
It's much better for them to wait for a child-killing baby-eater who also has child porn on his phone or something that plays better than "yeah, uh, we want to go look for evidence against the other 6"
Out of naïveté I am curious: if it is the right to not incriminate yourself that prevents a defendant from being forced to unlock her phone, is it different if the evidence being sought is against a third party? That is, could someone who has been convicted on other evidence be compelled to unlock her phone if the prosecution believes there is evidence on that device to convict, say, a higher rank in a drug operation? Does the third party doctrine apply to private citizens? I am not endorsing this view, merely curious.
IANAL, but my understanding is that you can be compelled to give evidence if you are given immunity from incrimination from any evidence you give, directly or indirectly.
People who prattle on about conspiracy theories really having nothing to add after the snowden revelations or wikileaks. Conspiracy theory? Nope, conspiracy fact, the US government does so many secret and nefarious activities the only sane default is to assume ulterior motives.
The people talking about what the NSA got up to before Snowden weren't engaging in conspiracy theories, they were basing what they said off prior whistleblowers and limited, logical extrapolation.
A lot of what Snowden put out wasn't new at all, it just gave us particulars on what we already knew or had very good reason to suspect based on that information. (e.g. if they have one fiber tap, they probably have many fiber taps.) [1] [2]
'The Government' is not one single unitary entity. It's a massive, sprawling bureacracy, with most agencies almost completely unaware of what the other is doing. Interagency cooperation is a rarity.
> To the extent the response requires the disclosure of information occurring before a grand jury, the government may file its response under seal, along with a redacted version suitable for public access.
Goodness the irony: Nobody is allowed secrets save the government.
It's incredibly presumptuous to assume that someone does not understand the protocol(s) of felony indictments because they object to government opacity, particularly in a case where the government is precisely impugning the value of privacy in a now-moot question with thuggish strong-arming.
The passage you quoted was intended to allow the government to make its case as why the question is not moot, while protecting the privacy of any defendants currently undergoing grand jury indictments. That is why grand jury seals exist.
Do you want the government making your indictment proceedings public? What if the grand jury declines to bring charges?
You actually can be prescribed Methamphetamine HCl—under the trade-name "Desoxyn"—as a last resort if the regular amphetamines aren't doing anything for you (some people just have really strong blood-brain barriers, apparently.)
It's not-at-all common, though. Much less than "millions of dollars" of it being sold.
Methamphetamine is also sold under generic names. Mayne Pharma sold about $4-5 million in 2014 in the US. Other searches indicate around 9-10 million from another company. Agreed that it's not that common and even 10 or 20 million isn't much. Though who knows how much of that is crazy DEA enforcement or just plain ignorance.
No, it's exactly what I said. Methamphetamine, not mixed amphetamines like Adderall. Meth is sold under the trade name Desoxyn as well as under generic names. Look up Mayne Pharma; they have 2014 results presentation that talks about their generic meth sales.
It's approved in the US for obesity as well as attention disorders. Schedule II, just like common painkillers (the non toxic ones anyways; adding a liver toxin moves painkillers to lower Schedule III).
Methamphetamine doesn't cause dental problems really. Just like Krokodil (desomorphine) doesn't cause the horrible issues you see in the news. It's just unhygienic users not taking care of themselves.
Just like if you start taking a diuretic you should increase water intake, other medicines require other steps.
The rationalization, should one have trouble inventing imaginative justifications out of thin air, is that they've captured a notorious kingpin, and they want to roll up this super villain's covert network of criminal masterminds, who are also coincidentally despicable child pornographers.
The thing that annoys me the most about the government's moronic handling of this whole phone, data, encryption, privacy, etc. issue is that if they had not been fucking around and abused their powers, not allowed the devil Bush and Cheney to drag America into the depths of authoritarian purgatory, is that companies would surely not be resisting legal court orders for decryption and they would not be looking at fully encrypting data at rest and in transit. It is the grotesque abuse, gluttony, and pathetically degenerate greed of the government and the retards at all the various itel and policing agencies that are to blame for the very state they are in where they feel they need to double down on their authoritarian tactics.
The Obama administration has been just as draconian and authoritarian, if not more, as was the Clinton administration (within the means of technology available at the time).
Ah yes, "Stop the Clipper chip!"[0]
The NSA has been looking to get backdoors into telecommunications for a long time. See their tapping of all international underwater cables (and back in the 80's I heard a second-hand report that they had commissioned some high-powered scanners that could read the contents of most mail envelopes, which were positioned to read most international mail).
It seems like USG will be unsuccessful at compelling Apple to unlock the phone. If there are no security vulnerabilities in the trusted hardware, then there is literally nothing special Apple can do to help unlock it. Although we can hope for a stay (in the sense of not advancing the inevitable big picture) whereby USG successfully attacks the chip with acid.
There may then be a detour where USG attempts to compel Apple to push an update to a new (and unknowing) suspect that renders their security moot. This entire process would be under a gag order (since it's an ongoing investigation), so perhaps it's even already happening. Once again, I guess I hope this is successful to avoid the otherwise inevitable showdown.
The next move directly pertaining to this situation will be for USG to push for some law banning the sale of encryption that cannot be opened with a court order. Yes, this battle has been fought before. But this time we're dealing with a purpose-built device, distributed turnkey by a commercial company. USG may not be able to compel Apple to act, but it can certainly constrain their actions when they do.
Also, technology is now acceptable to put on the "news" so the entire populace can be browbeaten with the four horsemen to make them compliant and dilute techies' informed voice. The percentage of civil disobedience will be insignificant - LUKS will likely not be setting precedent.
Plus the major technology companies having become part of the establishment and vice-versa, so cooperating with the government is in their direct business interest (as long as the PR is managed). In this larger situation, Apple will cry uncle long before USG does - I doubt they want an import ban.
So all of this points to such a law being passed, I'd guess 2-3 years out. If Free solutions aren't outright criminalized by the same legislation (ala RIPA), then something supplemental after that. It's a lot easier to "address" questions of constitutionality and basic human rights against a single unsympathetic defendant.
Will we successfully retreat to steganographic filesystems, and can we encourage enough drug dealers et al to adopt them such that the leviathan encounters effective technological pushback? Or do we have to wait for all of this to become widely accepted, then for norms to adapt and persecution to finally end? Interesting times indeed.
Unfortunately there is a lot Apple can do to help unlock the phone -- Apple can sign a new ROM and not respect the 10-tries-and-zeroize, I believe, even on a 6S and iOS 9.
There's also some unencrypted content which could be dumped with a signed ROM on a locked/powered off phone, although I believe there are ways to dump this as non-apple. This has evolved over time -- it was much more open pre iOS 8, and I haven't read the entire iOS 9 documentation or tried to verify it for iOS 9 yet.
The rate limit portion is in hardware, but the 10 tries is not. IMO Apple should make an effort to avoid being in a privileged position for deployed phones; it's unavoidable with iCloud for the current architecture, but they could do a lot to avoid the "special rom can dump more" issue. At the very least the 10 tries and dead could be moved into hardware.
I've no idea about the implementation specifics, so I was just assuming the 10 tries are part of the trusted security chip. Obviously if some features are implemented solely with software, then those can be defeated even without an unlocking (since the system is based on a low entropy passcode).
Honestly if Apple can indeed break their own security, I would call that fortunate for not advancing the inevitable showdown. Widespread proprietary software puts us in a very poor position for creating precedents, since Apple is eminently controllable by USG.
I believe the thing here is a chicken-and-egg problem: in order to install whatever security-disabling thing they'd come up with to let the phone be unlocked, first they'd have to manage to unlock the phone.
Sorry, I meant that using Free software to keep secrets from the government (against a warrant) would eventually be criminalized in the US, after such norms have been established for easier to attack proprietary solutions. (Proprietary solutions can be attacked using commercial law to ban their manufacture, whereas USG seems to know it can't really prohibit the distribution of Free software).
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/feds-apple-must-s...
""" That's because unlocking the iPhone was never about this case. It was about putting Apple in the position of unlocking every iPhone that the government will ever want unlocked now and into the future because if you do one you have no argument against doing the next one. And to make sure that all iPhones now and into the future can be unlocked. There, does that make more sense? """
That's really all this is about.... setting precedent and pushing legal events down a logical path that'll eventually lead to a judge ruling Apple must make backdoors into all future iOS versions. They have to push hard to get a favorable ruling quickly before everyone updates to the new iOS that Apple can't unlock at all. Because by then they'd have a much more difficult legal argument to make.