Comment by exabrial

16 hours ago

With my current knowledge of the case, I'd say Apple was clearly in the moral wrong and it's a pretty dark mark in their past.

My understanding is the suspect was detained and law enforcement was not asking for a dragnet (at least thats what they stated publicly), and they were asking for a tool for a specific phone. Apple stated the FBI was asking them to backdoor in all iPhones, then the FBI countered and said thats not what they were asking for. Apple then marched triumphantly into the moral sunset over the innocent victims'; meanwhile the FBI then send funds to a dubious group with questionable ethics and ties to authoritarian regimes.

In my opinion, Apple should have expediently helped here, if for no other reason than to prevent the funding of groups that support dragnets, but also out of moral obligation to the victims.

Are you certain Apple could unlock this phone (short of making a software change that compromised all iPhones)?

  • And why would it matter? Even if the capability to create a magic key that unlocked a specific phone remained entirely within a company's hands for future use, why wouldn't the courts just continue to ask them to use it? It's not like the victims of all sorts of other crimes don't have similar don't similarly deserve justice.

    Law enforcement at the time was even admitting (which we'd later find out to be correct) that there likely was nothing of value on the phone. It seems fairly obvious that the FBI was trying to use a high profile case to force a paradigm shift. Perhaps we can argue it'd be a good and just one, but arguing that they weren't seems not right.

  • Apple said they could do it. And they didn't tell the FBI they can't do it, they said they don't want to.

  • I make no claim either way nor do I have insider knowledge of what they could and could not do.

    • Neither do I have inside knowledge.

      Instead I am only aware from what has been published that there is the so-called "Secure Enclave" chip in the iPhone hardware manifest that will only give up its secrets to a biometric match, or a user password. That would seem to leave Apple's hands tied?

Seeing how strained your good-faith interpretation is has further entrenched my belief that San Bernadino was a false flag operation by the FBI.

There is no world in which a post-PRISM compliant Apple cannot be coerced by the feds for an investigation. It's just a matter of how much pressure the FBI wanted to apply; Apple's colossal marketing win is the sort of thing that you would invent if you wanted to manufacture consumer trust, not "prove" anything to cryptographers. Playing devil's advocate, "authoritarian regimes" are exactly the sort of place you would send the iPhone to if you already had the information and wanted to pretend like it was hard to access.

If we assume a worst-case-scenario where Apple was already under coercion by the FBI, everything they did covers up any potential wrongdoing. It was all talk, no walk. Neither side had to show any accountability, and everyone can go on happily using their devices for private purposes.