Posted on 07/14/2016 1:51:21 PM PDT by Swordmaker
Sen. John McCain warned Google and Apple executives Thursday that the Senate Armed Services Committee “has subpoena power” that could compel them to testify on why their encryption systems on newer smartphones are not accessible to law enforcement operating under court orders.
The Arizona Republican, who chairs the panel, said, “There’s an urgency” to finding a solution to the matter of protecting privacy while also not closing out police, prosecutors and intelligence agencies from lawfully pursuing criminals and terrorists.
At the start of the hearing, McCain noted that Tim Cook, president of Apple, declined to attend the session. “This is unacceptable,” he noted of Cook’s reluctance to appear, as the hearing neared its end.
Sen. Jack Reed, (D-R.I.) and ranking member, said, reaching an agreement on this issue is “something than cannot take forever” while noting figures such as Michael Chertoff, former secretary of Homeland Security; Gen. Michael Hayden, former CIA director, and others have come down on the side of the companies’ positions regarding users’ privacy.
McCain indicated at the hearing, the second on cyber encryption that he has called, he was leaning toward passing legislation rather than establishing a commission to study the issue. One proposal in the Senate is to have the commission make a recommendation back to Congress and the administration within a year or 18 months.
Speaking as a former assistant attorney general in the George W. Bush administration, Kenneth Wainstein said, prosecutors “have to submit to lawful court orders” and so should Apple, Google and others who include that kind of security feature on their devices. It is “up to Congress to make that point legislatively.”
Referring to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, where law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community did not share information, “we made the mistake of inaction” in not working together and with the private sector.
Cyrus Vance Jr., district attorney for Manhattan, told the committee, “The fact of the matter is [an earlier version of iPhone] was extremely secure.” But in the wake of the revelations from Edward Snowden on the surveillance activities of the National Security Agency, Google and Apple developed operating systems where encryption was embedded to address privacy concerns and said not to be available, even to the manufacturer, through a backdoor.
That encryption feature took on new urgency for law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the wake of the San Bernardino terrorist shootings when local police and the FBI could not access what was on the phone taken from the Syed Farook, who was killed in a shootout.
In short, the device’s security works this way: the user has a four letter or digit pin, but after 10 failed tries to access the data is wiped clean. The FBI eventually paid hackers over $1 million to gain access to the phone’s data.
While there are legitimate concerns about privacy from users and proprietary information from manufacturers, Wainstein said it was up to the companies to show “how this damage will occur.”
John Inglis, a former NSA deputy director and now a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, said the technology is likely available to address concerns from users and the manufacturers and the government.
“We must establish the overarching goal before enacting laws,” he said.
Vance said most criminals do not actively encrypt their communications, but that security feature already in place blocks law enforcement and prosecutors from gathering evidence in cases ranging from child pornography to murder. He added that his office has more than 300 phones with that feature in its hands but the data on them are not accessible to building cases. He decribed the companies’ position regarding this inaccessible data as “simply acceptable collateral damage,” even in criminal cases.
Sen. Angus King, (I-Maine), said while the encryption horse is already out of the barn because it is in place, “this should be a legislative solution.” He encouraged the witnesses to send additional comments to the committee as it moves forward to its next hearing on cyber security.
>So you can compel a manufacturer to design and inferior product...
Why not? Fedzilla is a master of creating inferior (illegal) products: O’Care website, Ponzi SS/MediXYZ, etc.
BTW, what was left of the phone was sitting at the bottom of the hole in the seat.
The whole front interior caught fire and the temperatures were very high. Why, I was there trying to put the fire out.
Circumstantial right now.
The fire dept was not called because we were able to put it out ourselves with two fire extinguishers. It happened in the parking lot of the business where we work so we had fire extinguishers handy. I'll shoot some pix. The car is still in the parking lot.
Uh. . . bingo!
My recollection is that WE didn't. The RINOs and GOPe did it over our strenuous objections.
In what fantasy world do you live?
If it is breakable for the good guys, it WILL be breakable for the bad guys. Encryption is binary, it is either unbreakable or it is an open door. There is no other choice.
Plastic? What plastic? Link and proof. iPhones are made out of aircraft grade Aluminum 7000 Alloy and Gorilla Glass with very little plastic even inside for very small circuit boards covered by a lot of metal shielding. Most likely you saw a plastic Android phone. . . if you saw anything at all.
iPhones are perfectly OK for being charged and used at the same time so long as they are being charged with Apple approved "Made for iPhone" switching power supply chargers that meet the specs Apple has published.
LOL!
Yeah troll, that’s why businesses who are required to use NIST encryption are all out of business...
Back to the two year olds with you.
Oh, I thought you said it was being used at the same time as being charged. Now it is just lying on the seat. You do know that cars are designed to have iOS devices plugged into them to feed music and other capabilities while also being charged, do you not? I suspect you are making a load of assumptions with little basis in fact.
Please demonstrate anyone who has broken Apple's iOS 8 and above 256 bit AES encryption on an iPhone 5S or higher device without knowing the users' passcode or AppleID. You really do not have a clue what you are talking about, and you demonstrate it by devolving to insults. . . just as you did in the previous threads where you were soundly beaten on this subject by everyone who DOES know what they are talking about.
You seem to think that the National Institute of Standards and Technology would certify as usable an encryption standard that would have a backdoor in it. . . or that any business or agency would accept such a standard. ROTFLMAO! Not on your life.
Your statement is a total non sequitur. They'd be out of business IF the encryptions they used DID have a backdoor in them that allowed someone to get into the encrypted data they require to be secure! You demonstrate once again you do not comprehend what you are arguing.
I’m LMAO at your ignorance...
It was powered up and charging (plugged into the car power plug) while it happened. That meant that there was continuous supply of power while the phone melted down.
The car ignition was turned while the owner went into the building. So he wasn't present when it happened (thank God) but it had to happen very quickly because he wasn't gone more than a few minutes.
I just shot some pix and it is clear that the area of the cabin near the phone reached very high temperatures. The front windshield on the passenger side started to melt along with the passenger side window. The passenger seat is also charred black with the seat missing all of the padding. The driver seat and surrounding areas are not burned.
It is clear that whatever caused the damage was sitting near or on the passenger seat and the phone was sitting on the passenger seat. What was left of the phone was sitting below what was left of the passenger seat (it fell through the seat springs).
It is indeed an Iphone and we are trying to recover the contacts information since this is critical to the business. The owner is not super technical and doesn't know if his contacts are backed up to the “cloud.” We are working with his provider.
I was the one who helped put the fire out. Clearly a person in the car would be severely injured if not die. The driver's side window was open and I actually thought that the owner was still in the car; it was difficult to tell since there was flames and smoke pouring out of the window.
It was powered up and charging (plugged into the car power plug) while it happened. That meant that there was continuous supply of power while the phone melted down.
The car ignition was turned while the owner went into the building. So he wasn't present when it happened (thank God) but it had to happen very quickly because he wasn't gone more than a few minutes.
I just shot some pix and it is clear that the area of the cabin near the phone reached very high temperatures. The front windshield on the passenger side started to melt along with the passenger side window. The passenger seat is also charred black with the seat missing all of the padding. The driver seat and surrounding areas are not burned.
It is clear that whatever caused the damage was sitting near or on the passenger seat and the phone was sitting on the passenger seat. What was left of the phone was sitting below what was left of the passenger seat (it fell through the seat springs).
It is indeed an Iphone and we are trying to recover the contacts information since this is critical to the business. The owner is not super technical and doesn't know if his contacts are backed up to the “cloud.” We are working with his provider.
I was the one who helped put the fire out. Clearly a person in the car would be severely injured if not die. The driver's side window was open and I actually thought that the owner was still in the car; it was difficult to tell since there was flames and smoke pouring out of the window.
OK. Was the charger a third party charger? I would be contacting Apple (1-800-My Apple) and discussing this with them. If the charging device was certified by Apple for the iPhone, then there may have been a defect in the unit. Apple may have some liability for the loss of the car. . . or maker of the charger may have to pickup that liability. . . but start with a call to Apple support.
Apple can also help in retrieving the contacts from the iCloud. Contacts is one of the primary items saved to the cloud automatically using the owner's AppleID.
By the way, dhs, sorry I was dismissive of your story. It is a very rare occurrence, but they do happen, usually when someone is using a charger from a third party that is not certified and does not shut down when the iPhone has reached full charge.
On the first four pages of a Google search for iPhone fires, there are four in the past two years reported in the US and Canada, one of them caused the death of a sleeping man. One was on an Alaska Airlines flight to Hawaii, also while being charged. It was not reported what kind of charger was being used on that flight. I know of a couple more in Asia and each of those involved cheap third party chargers.
Only two of the reports involved phones that were not being charged when they started heating up and the caught on fire.
On the fifth page of Google’s results a fifth iPhone fire is reported, also in Canada. Three of the five are Canadian reports. I wonder why that is?
Incidentally, rethinking what I commented earlier, there is an iPhone model that does have quite a bit of plastic in its construction: the iPhone 5C, which has a colored plastic case.
I don't know how far he wants to go beyond having his insurance company write him a check for the total. He may not want a long back-and-forth with Apple (if they are liable in the end).
Thanks and good to know that the icloud backup setting is by default. That means that this his information is online somewhere.
YOU are the one who has repeatedly demonstrated amazing ignorance about encryption. . . and you've done it again. Please tell us again about how you can have a cheap backdoor for law enforcement that the bad guys aren't going to find out about and use.
Tell us how the authorities in charge of the backdoors are going to keep their backdoor keys safe and secure from theft, bribery, or extortion from the bad guys. Or, buddy, how do the good guys guard against the bad guys just reverse engineering the backdoors simply because the bad guys KNOW the backdoors exist.
Unless you can even begin to grasp the complexities of those questions, which you don't even have an inkling are at the heart of what you claim is "easy and cheap" to do to create an encryption which is law enforcement friendly, you ARE IGNORANT about the entire topic.
Everyone who gets an iOS device and signs up for an AppleID receives 5GBs of storage space in the iCloud for free. . . and the iOS device stores certain data by priority there for backup purposes. Primarily it will be the users contacts, settings, etc. If one has more than one iOS device sharing the same AppleID, then the contacts are automatically loaded onto the new device on setup. That would be the best way to recover his contacts. Replace the iPhone and set it up with the same AppleID. it would all come back.
You are the ignorant one.
WOW! That’s quite a mess. It does indeed look as if the ignition point was located on the passenger seat. I don’t see a charging cable leading to that area, however.
It is certainly possible it was an iPhone as a few have burst into flame when being charged with non-Apple certified chargers that will over-charge an already fully charged battery.
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