Apple Responds to the FBI's Order with an Open Letter.

[CommandMan7]

This is what I have argued for a long time... Glad to see Apple agrees. Although it is a bit questionable that they're playing the "we love this country" argument when they manufacture in China, but still it is heartwarming to see them take a stand, at all. I am very glad to see this, and hope it will set a precedent that encryption must be preserved. I wish to see some laws passed, maybe even a constitutional amendment, to protect encryption and this is the first step on that path.

 

edit: 

my point is that although they are doing this for the wrong reasons (financial gain, not because they actually care) this is very significant that the 2nd most valuable company on earth is standing up for strong encryption. It will set a precedent that will allow the smaller people who do care to actually stand a chance against the government's attempts to put back doors in everything.

 

double edit:

This is pretty much how it is - 

[MarcoR]

It's great to see Apple sticking to their guns and directly challenging the authority of the Federal Government over this. 

 

Also nice to see Apple indirectly call out every other company that hasn't taken a strong position yet. More companies need to get onboard with encryption and stand against abuse of government power. 

 

Having a full SCOTUS bench is more important than ever since this case is assured to head there and will set some damning precedence either way. 

[DarkBlade2117]

I wonder how long a group of people from LTT forums could unlock the phone, I don't know exactly but I'd have a few ideas to get the info out lol. The government is stupid anyways, Think they are so smart until technology apart of the issue.

[jasonr22]

This response was FANTASTIC and couldn't have been put any better.  Thank you Apple for choosing security over emotional causes.  If they were "forced" (not even sure how the government could) to do this then all encrypted data everywhere would be fair game.

[Sunako]

Apples response is nothing more then an attemp to make the self look better in public eye before their 5 days are up and have to help or be found in contemp of the court order. As for the order itself it is not to break the  encryption but a firmware to extent the lockout attempt limit so they can systematically go thur every password possible in a brute force. Apple can do this to this single phone and others requested in the future on a case by case basis without giving law enforcement the firmware so they can do this at will.

 

    I myself find it deplorable of Apple to release a public statement when they only have to responds to the court. In an act to incite the public to garner support. You all may hate me for my views but they are my own and I hope you can respect that.

[samcool55]

I don't like apple. But i agree with them.

 

I'm happy that they decide to protect their users and are doing the ONLY right thing to do.

This is what they should do, and they should keep it that way. 

 

FBI, you have reached your limit, stop pushing and don't cross it. Or hell might break loose. And the gov is to blame in that case.

[SurvivorNVL]

Just for that, I'll buy an iPhone 7.  Good job Apple.  Oh, hell, I'll throw a 5k iMac in there too.  Why not!

[MarcoR]

1 hour ago, DarkBlade2117 said:

I wonder how long a group of people from LTT forums could unlock the phone, I don't know exactly but I'd have a few ideas to get the info out lol. The government is stupid anyways, Think they are so smart until technology apart of the issue.

 

If you think anyone on LTT could unlock it, you are sorely mistaken. 

 

iOS is encrypted on a level that makes the FBI consider PUBLIC LEGAL ACTION instead of wasting time brute forcing their way through, because thats the only thing they can do. Supercomputers don't exist yet that could hammer their way through the encryption on both iOS and Android. Full disk encryption is no joke. There is a very good reason why Apple has so many warnings in both user guides and their security white papers about not losing your passcode - you have a fancy paperweight otherwise. 

 

The encryption is just that good and that uncrackable right now and for the foreseeable future. Thats why these agencies are pissy, they have no backdoor to access and they have no time effective method of cracking the encryption. 

The government isn't stupid, they've got access to tools that maybe only black hats could rival. They can call upon as much supercomputing power they need, but even that isn't enough. They aren't stupid, they're rather smart when it comes to cracking things open. iOS is just that locked down that their usual methods clearly aren't working. 

[GoodBytes]

This is good and bad, in my opinion. Good because it is good for the consumers, and by competition other company will follow. Bad because the government has a warrant, and this kind of activity promotes government to actually support NSA-style tracking, and force companies to put back doors for the government to use as they will.

[captain cactus]

Guys, if you still haven't found a reason to hate our good ol' Donald Trump, here, have one:

 

http://www.macrumors.com/2016/02/17/donald-trump-on-apple-backdoor-refusal/

[Master Disaster]

Whats the opposite to digging? Levitating?

 

Yeah lets go with that...

 

Apple be levitating.

 

Seriously though, great to see a company stand up for the little guy once in a while. Apple, for all their shit that they pull with self bricking phones and the apple ecosystem being locked down and impossible to move away from once your into it, seem to be the only company who actually give a shit about privacy and data protection and that deserves them at least a little bit of kudos.

 

Well done Apple and Tim.

 

43 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

This is good and bad, in my opinion. Good because it is good for the consumers, and by competition other company will follow. Bad because the government has a warrant, and this kind of activity promotes government to actually support NSA-style tracking, and force companies to put back doors for the government to use as they will.

 

Can I tell you a real true life story...

 

I was a wide eyed teenager, just 17 and fresh into college and like all teenagers I was curious about our colleges computer network. Now this was back when Windows 200 had just come out and XP was a distant dream and our college computers were running NT, there was this trick where you could create a new folder with a whitespace as the name and it would bypass the disk quotas entirely but I digress.

 

I had worked out that when you type in a login username to the system you could tell if it was a real login by the time it took to refuse the login, by that I mean that if I entered a username that existed with a fake password it would sit at the login box for 10 seconds before saying the password is incorrect where as if I entered a username that didn't exist it would fire that invalid password message instantly.

 

Over the course of a few weeks I had tried many different usernames in an attempt to try and find a backdoor until one day I tried the username "backdoor" and to my amazement it actually did the 10 second delay before refusing the login. Hmm I thought s I then tried my luck at guessing the password, after another week or two I had the thought of trying "backdoor" for both the username and password and guess what, I was in and I had full unrestricted administrator access to the network, straight away I logged out.

 

I consulted with a few of my closet friends from my course about my discovery immediately  and one of the guys had said that the best course of action would be to create another unrestricted account alongside the admin accounts as it was very unlikely the admins would be logging any actions taken by other admins, they don't spy on themselves was what he actually said so this was what we did. We created another admin account and for the next few weeks 4 of us took the time to to monitor and learn about how the system worked, we were very careful to not do anything suspicious with our new power.

 

Of course within a month or two word had spread around the various people on our course that we had admin access and eventually the account got out, Adrian suggested that we should shut the account down and use the backdoor to create another account in an effort to try and cover ourselves which was our intention. Unfortunately for us when we hit out next lecture the IT tech guys were waiting for us, as it happens one guy had spent the entire lunch break basically wreaking havoc on the network, banning peoples accounts for no reason and changing things he knew nothing about.

 

The 4 of us who were responsible held our hands up and were escorted to the Network service room where the IT guys worked from and we had a nice long chat about what had happened. The lead IT tech asked us how we had breached the network so I asked him to pass me a keyboard and infront of him I logged into the backdoor account. Looking at us puzzled he was actually very honest with us, as it turns out even the IT technicians at the college were not aware of the backdoor account on their own system, as it transpired the contracted company (RM) who did the installation had added a backdoor for their own use in case of emergency and not told the IT guys at the college anything about it. Now you might be wondering how I would know that, well the lead IT tech at the time (and hes still there to this day) is a close friend of my mum and he had told her about it a few weeks after it happened.

 

Of course all 4 of us were whisked off the the deans office and expelled with instant effect.

 

The point of this story, a backdoor is never a good idea, if access is available to one party its a weak point which can be attacked and any system is only as strong as its weakest point.

 

Sorry for the wall.

[Stadin6]

1 hour ago, Master Disaster said:

Can I tell you a real true life story...

if i where you i would not tell anyone about it, not even my closest friends. 

[RicciardiVFX]

Man, I am not technically a fan of Apple or Cook... but I am NOW!

[Master Disaster]

23 minutes ago, Stadin6 said:

if i where you i would not tell anyone about it, not even my closest friends. 

Honestly, college was my first experience of large computer networks, I had a PC at home but at school all our computers were Acorn Archimedes. There was only 2 PCs in the whole school and they were strictly teachers only.

 

Adrian seemed to know a lot about how networks worked and I couldn't have done much without him, the other 2 were a part of our group and I thought I could trust them, as it happened it was Paul who leaked the account but it wasn't deliberate. The noon wrote it down in one of his text books which he loaned to another guy (Kyle), that's how it got out. It was Kyle who went on the rampage and got us busted and yet he walked away scot free as we didn't grass him up.

[ChineseChef]

While I support Apple's stance against the gov't, I don't see it as much more than symbolic.  At some point the gov't is going to force a backdoor or something into a major system, be it OS, provider, something.  And unfortunately the only way I see it stopping is to have one country do it, force all companies to build in a backdoor.  And then have that country just get utterly destroyed in either the global market or simply get hacked to the point of non-functionality.  We need a "nuclear" strike using one of these backdoor ideas, just to show the world how bad it will be if we all keep going down this road.

 

The problem is the masses don't care because they don't understand.  And the gov'ts don't care because they are desperate to maintain as much control as possible.  And the companies only care about profits.  Essentially, we need someone to care enough that they make everyone else care.  And this will only happen if a major country gets totally destroyed by forcing backdoors.  Because until one of the giants gets brought to its knees, no one is going to care or even think it can happen.

[DarkBlade2117]

2 hours ago, MarcoR said:

 

If you think anyone on LTT could unlock it, you are sorely mistaken. 

 

2 hours ago, MarcoR said:

 

If you think anyone on LTT could unlock it, you are sorely mistaken. 

 

iOS is encrypted on a level that makes the FBI consider PUBLIC LEGAL ACTION instead of wasting time brute forcing their way through, because thats the only thing they can do. Supercomputers don't exist yet that could hammer their way through the encryption on both iOS and Android. Full disk encryption is no joke. There is a very good reason why Apple has so many warnings in both user guides and their security white papers about not losing your passcode - you have a fancy paperweight otherwise. 

 

The encryption is just that good and that uncrackable right now and for the foreseeable future. Thats why these agencies are pissy, they have no backdoor to access and they have no time effective method of cracking the encryption. 

The government isn't stupid, they've got access to tools that maybe only black hats could rival. They can call upon as much supercomputing power they need, but even that isn't enough. They aren't stupid, they're rather smart when it comes to cracking things open. iOS is just that locked down that their usual methods clearly aren't working. 

I don't know my friend is a software engineer at Apple and unlocked a iPad 2 my friend got off ebay that wasn't supposed to be locked, Though he would probably be fired if he did it for the FBI and he makes pretty good money lol, Also it doesn't stop my belief that the FBI is full of full blown stupid ass monkeys that just punch keyboards.

[Inventrious]

Honestly, I'm kinda confused... doesn't the NSA currently have access to everything we're doing anyway? Or did they stop their spying or something?

[Mew]

Tbh, Apple could be doing this for publicity. It's easy for Apple or anyone to be the first in doing this since there is no precedence. If Apple is able to repeatedly deny the government backdoors into their encryption in the future, then props to Apple. 

[Stuff_]

I've been reading the responses of users on Facebook, and various news sources. I have to say, I am very disappointed. So many people believe that Apple should be forced to do this, and their reasoning being that the violent acts were unbearably horrendous. 

 

They were terrible, terrible acts. But you do not give up your privacy because of this. I am actually appalled that the FBI would ask Apple to support this. 

 

I suppose it comes down to a little more than just these two terrorists. They are the scapegoat used by the government to try and pressure companies into including backdoor's into many encryption systems, which immediately creates a flaw.

 

So many uneducated people on this matter (every new source and Facebook user that thinks this is a good thing). Even my parents think that having Sony decrypt messages and conversations between PSN users is a good idea, as long as they are terrorists. This is doing a complete 180 on encryption and protection. 

 

I think the FBI doesn't understand how large the security (white hat, black hat, whatever color hat you want) community is. Plenty of hackers would looooove to have a crack at reverse engineering any backdoor that Apple would implement. Even if it takes years. As long as the probability of being able to crack it is better than at least 200 years to crack, I don't want it as my security. 

[azurezeed]

well at least apple is doing some things right

[PCgamer324]

A true conspiracy theorist knows this is simply staged to fool the public into buying apple devices thinking they're secure where there're full of existing government backdoors.  Why has no one found these backdoors yet?

 

 

Aliens

[ace_cheaply]

"People willing to sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither and will lose both" 

-Benjamin Franklin

[Beskamir]

If Apple holds their ground on this I'd actually consider buying their products to show them my support of their policies.

[SoloTurkey]

Props to Apple.

[Sunshine1868]

To the peeps saying it's "just a publicity stunt" or "they just want to look good":

 

This applies to EVERYONE who has a smartphone or anything that is password-protected.

Google (android users), Facebook (I'm sure most of you are on Facebook), and a few other HUGE tech companies have come out to say they support Apple in this regard. Apple is hoping to get an 18th century law rewritten or taken off the books completely because being forced to unlock iPhones means the Gov't will have precedent to unlock EVERY smartphone and password-protected device. LG, Samsung, Google, Huwai (however its spelled), etc. will ALL have to build backdoors into their devices.

 

This affects everyone. Not just apple users.

 

Yes, Apple takes a lot of flack because "shiny Facebook box", but they're doing the right thing here and we need to support that.