Apple v. FBI/DOJ strikes again,
Now in Massachusetts for a Gang Member
Ping!
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Posted on 04/10/2016 1:04:45 AM PDT by Swordmaker
(Reuters) — A U.S. magistrate judge in Boston in February ordered Apple to assist law enforcement officers in examining the iPhone of an alleged gang member, according to a court filing unsealed on Friday.
“Reasonable technical assistance consists of, to the extent possible, extracting data from the device, copying the data from the device onto an external hard drive or other storage medium and returning the aforementioned storage medium to law enforcement,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler wrote.
Apple has been under pressure in recent months to assist law enforcement agencies in searching its iPhones after the U.S. Justice Department sought access to a phone used by a gunman who fatally shot 14 people in San Bernardino, California, in December. The FBI has since said it has figured out a secret method for unlocking iPhones.
Apple objected to the Boston order on the same grounds as it did in the San Bernardino case, an Apple employee briefed on the matter said, and the government did not pursue the matter in this case.
(Excerpt) Read more at venturebeat.com ...
13th Amendment
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“The FBI has since said it has figured out a secret method for unlocking iPhones”
I’m still thinking this statement is a fig leaf.
Boston judge orders Apple to help FBI, but not decrypt iPhoneupdated 04:56 pm EDT, Sat April 9, 2016 — by MacNN Staff —MacNewsNetwork
Order tries to straddle middle ground in court case surrounding gang activity
Recently-revealed court documents show that -- in three similar court cases where the US government was attempting to decrypt seized iPhones by seeking to force Apple's compliance using the All Writs Act -- the score at present is win, lose, and draw. A court in Brooklyn flat-out rejected the US Department of Justice's appeal to force Apple to weaken its security, though the government is appealing the decision. In San Bernardino, the FBI won an initial order, but later retreated from the case; and it turns out that in the Boston gang-activity case, the judge did order Apple to assist the FBI -- but specifically excluded decrypting the suspect's iPhone contents, or developing a way to decrypt, from being part of the order.
The order was issued in February, and Apple has challenged the order despite its relative "friendliness" to the company, but the government has not yet responded, effectively putting the case on hold. The Boston case was revealed through a motion to unseal filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, and involved the FBI again trying to force Apple to decrypt an iPhone (believed to be an iPhone 6 Plus running iOS 9.1) in a gang-related case. Since the case that the FBI later dropped in San Bernardino became public, it has been revealed that the FBI and DOJ, contrary to their claims, have attempted to use the AWA some 63 times to try and force companies to decrypt encrypted communications.
In this case, the iPhone was seized from an alleged member of a Massachusetts-based street gang called the Columbia Point Dawgz. Also seized was an AT&T "flip phone," but that device was already cracked by the agency itself. While the exact model of the iPhone was not revealed in the filings, the listed IMEI number corresponds to an iPhone 6 Plus. Because the iPhone 6 and later have hardware-level encryption in Apple's Secure Enclave that stores passcode and fingerprint data (along with financial details and more), only Apple will be able to develop a hack into the device, and the method used by the FBI to break into the San Bernardino gunman's iPhone 5c, which lacks the Secure Enclave, will not work.
Apple has already said it has no intention of ever compromising the security of its recent devices, since compromising the Secure Enclave would render the iPhone unsafe for any sort of sensitive information storage -- and could reveal the financial information and much more for millions of Americans if the method was discovered. Ironically, the evidence that led to the arrest of Columbia Point Dawgz member Desmond Crawford appears to have been gathered using traditional phone wiretaps, information from other prosecuted members, and other forms of traditional police work.
The FBI petitioned the Boston court to force Apple to decrypt the seized iPhone, but Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler instead offered an order that compels Apple to offer technical assistance -- which it was already doing and has consistently done in such cases -- but specifically precluded Apple from having to bypass the iPhone's encryption. The order says that Apple must provide the FBI with any data it can extract from Crawford's phone, but the company "is not required to attempt to decrypt, or otherwise enable law enforcement's attempts to access any encrypted data." The wording of the order is such that it is for all intents and purposes worthless to the FBI.
"Such reasonable technical assistance consists of, to the extent possible, extracting data from the Device, copying the data from the Device onto an external hard drive or other storage medium, and returning the aforementioned storage medium to law enforcement," the order reads in part. Apple must also, if it can, "provide the FBI with the suspect's Personal Identification Number (P.I.N.) or Personal Unlock Code (P.U.K.) so that access can be gained to the Target Telephone 1 for this search," but the order only applies to methods Apple or the FBI could use to gain this information that does not compromise the security of the device, or decrypt its contents -- such as, for example, providing the FBI with any unencrypted information from an iCloud backup of the device, if one exists.
Apple has said it always and without force delivers to law enforcement agencies all the information it has access to, and this has been confirmed by the FBI in testimony to Congress, but the company's use of encryption means that the actual content of iMessages, iCloud emails, and the contents of the users' iPhones are not accessible due to the use of encryption for which only the user has the unlock code (in the form of Touch ID or a passcode). Apple can, and routinely does with a lawful warrant, provide agencies like the FBI with "meta" information about the time or destination of emails or messages.
Carriers, likewise, often provide information on the time, destination number, or length of phone calls, and between the two, law enforcement agencies in a legitimate investigation already have a great deal of information about how a given smartphone was used. The pursuit of the All Writs Act to force companies like Apple and Google to provide "back doors" that allow for complete decryption of a mobile device or computer is seen by most legal and constitutional scholars as an unacceptable breach of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, as well as effectively acting as "government-forced speech," since computer code has been interpreted by the courts as a form of protected First Amendment speech.
Apple has said that it would be forced to write a tool that would compromise the security of its iPhone and other devices, and fears doing so because the method would inevitably fall into the wrong hands -- which some critics say include the US government itself. The DOJ has already indicated that if such a tool existed, it would use it for routine investigations into all manner of crimes or suspected crimes, and would likely begin seizing smartphones and tablets as a routine part of even early investigations in the hopes that incriminating evidence would be found.
FBI Director Comey has admitted the only Apple devices the FBI can unlock, and that with a lot of work, are Apple devices with A6 processors and older. Essentially that means the iPhone 5c, 5, and older, the original iPad Air and the original iPad Mini, and any older iPads. Of course the older iPhones and iPads were not protected with encryption at all. That innovation came in with the iPhone 5 and 5C with the A6 processor with the Encryption Engine sub-processor built into the Processor SoC.
The A7 and later processors were designed to use the Secure Enclave system which is far more secure.
I never knew Apple used AMD A6 processors???
Using Hellary’s ‘wiping’ logic, I would ‘unlock’ the phone by prying the halves apart with a screwdriver, and then continuing disassembly with diagonal cutters and soldering iron.
Maybe soften up in a microwave first.
They don't.
This A6 is designed by Apple and made by Samsung. It runs the ARMv7s instruction set.
Apple uses Apple A6, Apple A7, Apple A8, and Apple A9 processors. Not AMD anything except some AMD graphic processors. Of course a little research would have shown you that.
COURT DOCUMENTS RELATED TO ALL WRITS ACT ORDERS FOR TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE
https://www.aclu.org/court-documents-related-all-writs-act-orders-technical-assistance
Links to documents at web page.
(Hate using ACLU as resource, but you do what you have to do.)
There are none located on the ACLU site you linked from 2016. The ones there are from 2013, 2014, and 2015.
I know, but those cases are a way in which to measure the change in tone in past filings of the different agencies to the aggressive, very public MO from the DOJ today.
Haven’t read them all of course, but the ones I have read are to the point. Contrast to the way the FBI/DOJ handled the ex parte order and Motion to Compel, throwing it into the spotlight while Comey sang like a canary about his issues in an active investigation.
I think you will find that Apple objected to opening iPhones with iOS 8 and above since it came out with the introduction of the iPhone 5S in the Fall of 2013. The iPads and iPhones I saw listed in most of the court orders applying to Apple here were for older models.
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