Posted on 11/20/2014 12:57:41 AM PST by Swordmaker
“The No. 2 official at the Justice Department recently warned top Apple executives that stronger encryption protections added to iPhones would lead to a horrific tragedy, such as a child dying, because police couldn’t access a suspect’s device, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday,” Dan Goodin reports for Ars Technica.
“The beefed up protections, Apple recently disclosed, mean that even when company officials are served with a court order, they will be unable to retrieve potentially crucial evidence such as photos, messages, or contacts stored on iPhones and iPads,” Goodin reports. “Instead, the data can be accessed only by people who know the passcode that serves as the encryption key.”
“Prior to changes introduced in iOS 8, Apple had the means to pull data off of a locked phone, and according to the WSJ, the company helped police do just that when it was served with a valid court order. Under the latest iOS version, the data can be recovered only by knowing the passcode. Passcodes that are sufficiently long and complex make it infeasible for Apple or anyone else to crack,” Goodin reports. “US Attorney General Eric Holder recently said it was ‘worrisome’ that tech companies were adding default encryption to consumer electronics. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently pushed back at a WSJ conference, saying ‘”Look, if law enforcement wants something, they should go to the user and get it. It’s not for me to do that.’”
Nope. The system doesn't really read fingerprints. It reads the capacitance of the living tissues ridges BELOW the actual fingerprints. They've tried to fake it up. It also requires a LIVING finger. One guy claimed he had done it by photocopying his finger then pressing the photocopy to the iPhone 5s and he got a good read on one out of four tries, but it turned out he was using the same finger he photocopied the finger print from and it was reading his own finger THROUGH the paper. It cannot read from a copy.
Someone has claimed to be able to do it with a system using superglue deposition on a special substrate finger glove in a vacuum, but the whole system is very expensive. And the success rate is very low. That means the likelihood is the fingerprint would trial out to passcode required before you got it to work.
Thanks for the input. As I’ve demonstrated, I’m no expert.
What the search for has to be in plain sight. If they are looking for child porn. They should not be looking for cash. Fruit of the poisonous tree. If they don't find child porn, then anything else they find is going to be very questionable about being admissible. It would smack of being a fishing expedition. I am not happy with the way search warrants have been expanded.
Trading liberty for safety results in getting neither.
NOT a popular POV.
Even most prolife people adamantly, and illogically IMO, defend the position that the “mother” is just another victim of the abortion.
If you are looking for hidden child porn hard copies, you don't have to tear the entire house apart looking in every possible place it could be hidden?
And if you are doing so, and come across counterfeit cash, isn't it in plain sight at the time you come across it?
IOW, if I have to open a drawer to see if what my warrant is for is in it, does the illegal cash I come across count as poisoned fruit? Doesn't seem logical.
I realize that after they've found the evidence defined in the warrant they have to stop searching. But of course they get around that by simply not "seeing" it until they have looked everywhere else.
I'm also not entirely happy with the way "reasonable search" has been defined.
Sorry Bro, gotta disagree with ya there. They won't make any money with that. Instead, they'll have a GPS chip that will log every time you exceed the speed limit, then communicate it back to the mothership so they can send you tickets in the mail.
Yes, as we learned in Atlas Shrugged, they want us to break those laws. Makes everyone easier to control.
You are correct. The Virginia case is the only case that has been heard on this issue and it is not binding on other courts. This is a very unsettled area of law. However, who knows how future courts will rule?
The legal reasoning is the following. The Supreme Court has held that the 5th Amendment protects against compelled, self-incriminating, testimony.
This is plainly compelled and the data could be self-incriminating. So the key legal question is whether biometric decryption constitutes testimony
Courts ask 2 questions when considering if compelled production is testimonial:
1. Does the production involve "contents of the mind" providing implicit testimony about the existence, possession,control,or authenticity of evidence.
2. Are the testimonial aspects of the production a "forgone conclusion" ( Forgone Conclusion doctrine)
The reasoning why biometrics aren't covered by the 5th Amendment is that they flunk the first question. There is no "content of the mind" involved in the collection of fingerprints, DNA,and blood. Thus it doesn't involve testimony ( as currently defined by the courts )
I agree with you that intent should be considered, but unless Congress enacts a statute either changing the definition of what is testimonial, or a specific statute concerning biometrics, this is what the courts go by.
I though it was since April 19, 1993. Didn't the FBI put child-proof caps on the 40 mm Ferret Model SGA-400 Liquid CS rounds and the 40mm M651E1 military pyrotechnic tear gas rounds before firing them into the compound at Waco?
Now they are trying to move beyond the womb maybe as long as 4 years path birth.
Great post, thank you.
Somewhere there is an App developer writing a foolproof way to lock you phone through a finger print or sequence of finger prints maybe even a Siri command to lock the phone with a very secure password.
If you have Hey Siri enabled you can issue a vocal command to the phone with out it being unlocked.
Lots of opportunity for an enterprising developer to defeat the government bullies.
good point.
This would then be analogous to requiring one to produce ANY document on which you had written down the passcode for your phone. Doesn't hold water. That means you have to always memorize the passcode. It can never be recorded anywhere that you have access to outside of your secured phone. You see the illogicity of their position when they ignore the intent of securing the intellectual key, whether it is by a series of numbers or with a personalized biometric system. The intellectual INTENT is the key.
Under the Constitution I should be able to take a thread, string it across my door, and tie it on either side, and say this is my SEAL against official government intrusion under the fourth and fifth amendments and it should be sufficient. Under the rule of LAW, and a government run by honorable men, only criminals would break it.
Unfortunately, there are few honorable men left in government, and we are no longer living under the rule of LAW but the rule of MEN, who ignore honor for convenience and whim. This is the very essence of what our battle is about.
If your warrant does not specify "counterfeit currency," that is NOT a good to be seized. You can confiscate it. But it most likely cannot be used as evidence against anyone in the house, as you would not have found it without the search warrant for another unrelated issue. There have been murder trials in which the murder weapon had to be excluded because it was found during a search for a totally unrelated crime and no weapon was listed to be sought or seized, and the murderer was not a resident, or arrested at the scene.
Search warrants are problematic because often there are other residents of the premises named in the warrants, uninvolved in the particulars of that search, whose property should not be searched or seized. . . but who might be involved in crimes unrelated to the warrant. That counterfeit cash may be the other resident's property . . . how does the seizure of that evidence affect the case against them? IS really it counterfeit? How do the Evidence Technicians know for certain? That is usually outside their field of expertise. It's not on the warrant to be seized for further testing. Warrants should not be allowed to become fishing expeditions for whatever they can find that looks interesting for their curiosity.
If something is in plain sight, they can apparently go back to the judge and get an amendment to the warrant, or request a new warrant. . . but I understand that is very rare. The circumstances would have to be extraordinary.
This would then be analogous to requiring one to produce ANY document on which you had written down the passcode for your phone. Doesn't hold water. That means you have to always memorize the passcode. It can never be recorded anywhere that you have access to outside of your secured phone.
And they have done just that in the Lavabit case ( and with Apple prior to their new system. They were demanding , and getting, peoples keys that were backed up on their servers ). If you want a good example of the government strong arming someone, watch this interview with Ladar Levison of Lavabit. I like how he initially responded to them when he was ordered to turn over his keys.
The law, as usual, is far behind the times. When these rulings on Testimony were made, there was no concept of biometric or electronic keys. If I choose to have a weak password key that I can remember in my head, I am protected. But if I decide to have a very secure password key ( long and random digits ) that I have to write down, then I am not protected. That's absurd. With thumbprint biometrics, it isn't actually the thumbprint that encrypts the data. The info from the thumbprint creates a hash key that then is used to encrypt.So if electronic keys were protected, then forcing a person to submit their thumbprint would have no effect, since all that would get them would be the hash key, which would have protected status.
Could not have said it better than you did. Thank you!
Now as far as enforcement goes, all the court could do was hold him in contempt for not disclosing the password. If it were a murder case and the guy knew he would be convicted with the evidence and possibly face life in prison or death, it would be better to take the contempt punishment. No judge could order someone to jail for life for contempt of court ( well so far. If Hillary gets in with a Dem Senate, then all bets are off. They will control the judiciary for the next 20 years with their appointments).
>> Granting amnesty to millions of illegal aliens will lead to a child dying.
My vote for thread winner.
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