It doesn't bother me if prosecutors are sending these phones to Apple to have them cracked open, so long as a Judge's signature is on the warrant. As unwieldy as the process is, I doubt it's going to be abused much.
I think many could easily imagine a day where it would be all too easy to find oneself a subject of prosecution and harassment from a legal system for professing unpopular opinions.
We are already there, friend, but I am not ready to engage in Civil War II just yet.
One could easily see the rogue prosecutors in the recent 'john doe' persecutions getting warrants exactly as you say, duly signed by a compliant judge to break into the phones of their targets.
Abuse of the system is a chronic problem, with or without iPhones. I don't think that John Doe prosecutor is out of the woods either.
Perhaps they'll modify them so that the code the feral government is currently clamoring to subvert will be in a section of read-only ram so that it won't be possible to subvert it at all.
You can't store a count in ROM. Somewhere it has to be in ram, and then it is hackable.
“As unwieldy as the process is, I doubt it’s going to be abused much.”
And if you’re wrong?
Precedent set = every jurisdiction will demand iPhone cracking on a frequent basis.
And Apple will respond by increasing the security to “we really can’t crack it at all now”.
Don’t forget that unbreakable is already available in iPhones, it just requires a long password.
It is obvious that we have a fundamentally different view of government and our ability to trust it. I have absolutely zero faith that the government can be trusted to do anything but enlarge it's own power and scope. It has burst the chains of the Constitution many, many years ago. They can't even perform the fundamental tasks delegated to them such as policing our border, yet, with every single failure, they demand just a little more of our rights, just a little more of our privacy, just a little more control over our lives.
We are already there, friend, but I am not ready to engage in Civil War II just yet.
I simply do not understand how you can admit that they are already out of control, yet you're perfectly willing to just blindly hand them even more power to be even more intrusive than they already are. It boggle the mind.
Abuse of the system is a chronic problem, with or without iPhones. I don't think that John Doe prosecutor is out of the woods either.
If the prosecutor spends a day in prison for his abuse of power I'll eat my hat. Hell I'll do it if they just strip him of his pension. It's simply not going to happen, because there is no longer any accountability left in our government.
Lord Acton got it wrong when he said that power corrupts. It's power without accountability that is corrosive and dangerous to the citizen. I'm sure the fact that an appellate court was finally found what would call bullshit on his witch hunt is pretty surprising to me. I'm sure that's cold comfort to all the people who's lives were turned upside down and destroyed at his hands.
You can't store a count in ROM. Somewhere it has to be in ram, and then it is hackable.
I was thinking that that part of the bootloader would be in rom that wouldn't be able to be overridden through a software update. Of course, that would have to be code that had been debugged with in an extraordinary amount of thoroughness since it would essentially be unchangable post-manufacture. Since Apple has total control over the hardware they manufacture, I'm pretty confident they'll find a way. I certainly hope they do in any case.