Apple hangs tough

[Craig Good]

Tim Cook's open letter to the FBI is pretty chilling.

[Jack Saunders]

Won't open.  I get apple.com in the browser bar, with a padlock next to it.  Is that the joke?  Not too many companies grab a laugh at the expense of the FBI.

On Feb 17, 2016, at 10:23 AM, Craig Good <clg...@gmail.com> wrote:

Tim Cook's open letter to the FBI is pretty chilling.

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[Craig Good]

That’s odd. Try the raw URL:

http://www.apple.com/customer-letter/

Or just go to apple.com and look for “a message to our customers”.

[jack saunders]

Got in as you suggested -- but still see that green padlock as first entry on URL.  What's that mean?

Cook's letter is convincing to me, but the govt would answer that -- yes, that's exactly what we want....to put the friends and confederates of these Apple customers at risk -- severe risk.  We're gonna kill 'em.

New forum out there:  Trump/Cruz voters and Hillary/Bernie voters.  Damn few "independents" to fight over anymore.  So no compromising.  Just "round up the suspects and kill em," or "privacy rights for all, no matter what."

 

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From: Craig Good <clg...@gmail.com>
To: Jack Saunders <Jack...@pacbell.net>
Cc: Ipse Dixit <Ipse-...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2016 11:12 AM
Subject: Re: [Ipse Dixit] Apple hangs tough

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[Craig Good]

That means you have a secure, HTTPS connection. You shouldn't trust any web page that doesn't give you that.

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[David Fetter]

On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 10:23:34AM -0800, Craig Good wrote:
> Tim Cook's open letter to the FBI <https://www.apple.com/customer-letter/>
> is pretty chilling.

All Tim's said in opposition can be summed up as, "we will not take
our engineers off other projects so we can build you an entire OS for
iPhone that's designed for brute force password cracking."

He specifically said he'd made engineers available to help with the
cracking effort of this one device.

Would you be so kind as to spell out your objection?

Cheers,
David.
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[Craig Good]

My objection is to the FBI, and the chilling part is that Cook had to write the letter at all.

I see now where that might have been confusing on my part.

> On Feb 17, 2016, at 13:18 PM, David Fetter <da...@fetter.org> wrote:
>
> Would you be so kind as to spell out your objection?

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[jack saunders]

I doubt it has anything to do with human resources management.  The govt pays every dime of the costs plus a specially negotiated ROI on the project...which is often so fat that it leads to an outlier positive quarter when these things come up in defense procurement.

More important to Apple is the consumer public relations.  Any tech company that caves and cooperates goes into the same optics bucket along with AT&T and other snoop-aiding carriers.  Apple, Google, Microsoft will do anything to avoid that image degrade.

 

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From: David Fetter <da...@fetter.org>
To: Ipse Dixit <Ipse-...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2016 1:18 PM

Subject: Re: [Ipse Dixit] Apple hangs tough

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[Craig Good]

According to this blog it is technically possible for Apple to comply with this order without releasing a back door into the wild.

I still think Apple should resist. But, if they take the phone and return the data, does anybody want to bet folding money that the feds will stop there in their efforts to get back doors to everything?

[Scott Hotes]

On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 2:58 PM, Craig Good <clg...@gmail.com> wrote:

According to this blog it is technically possible for Apple to comply with this order without releasing a back door into the wild.

I still think Apple should resist. But, if they take the phone and return the data, does anybody want to bet folding money that the feds will stop there in their efforts to get back doors to everything?

The feds will never stop in their efforts to obtain this kind of back-door access, it is in their nature.

OK, I read through the blog post.  Basically the FBI isn't asking (at least in this instance, as described

in the post) for a "back door", but rather, they want Apple to provide software that will let them perform

a brute-force attack on the phone's password without tripping iOS lockout features (like incurring a

forced delay between password attempts.)

It is not in the public's interest that software such as this get out into the open.  Apple producing it,

whether or not their intention is to keep it private, for their use only, in response to law enforcement

subpoena, would still seem like an unnecessary risk to incur, given the potential cost.

Scott

[Brian Howell]

According to the Daily Beast, Apple has previously unlocked 70 iPhones in response to court orders:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/17/apple-unlocked-iphones-for-the-feds-70-times-before.html

...Apple argued in the New York case, it shouldn’t have to, because “forcing Apple to extract data… absent clear legal authority to do so, could threaten the trust between Apple and its customers and substantially tarnish the Apple brand,” the company said, putting forth an argument that didn’t explain why it was willing to comply with court orders in other cases.

 

“This reputational harm could have a longer term economic impact beyond the mere cost of performing the single extraction at issue,” Apple said.

 

Apple’s argument in New York struck one former NSA lawyer as a telling admission: that its business reputation is now an essential factor in deciding whether to hand over customer information.

 

“I think Apple did itself a huge disservice,” Susan Hennessey, who was an attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the NSA, told The Daily Beast. The company acknowledged that it had the technical capacity to unlock the phone, but “objected anyway on reputational grounds,” Hennessey said. Its arguments were at odds with each other, especially in light of Apple’s previous compliance with so many court orders.

 

It wasn’t until after the revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that Apple began to position itself so forcefully as a guardian of privacy protection in the face of a vast government surveillance apparatus. Perhaps Apple was taken aback by the scale of NSA spying that Snowden revealed. Or perhaps it was embarassed by its own role in it. The company, since 2012, had been providing its customers’ information to the FBI and the NSA via the PRISM program, which operated pursuant to court orders.

[jack saunders]

The ghost of Edward Snowden.  

The bonehead play here was not to acknowledge the 70 cases up front, in Cook's opening salvo early this week.  That's a lot of cases....presumably many variables, sortable to the public only by NSA's claim on timing -- pre and post Snowden.

It's always important to factor in special emotional forces that drive key stakeholder subsets -- in this case, law enforcement and their lawyers.  To be perceived as siding with Snowden on the public stage is tantamount to pissing in law enforcement's punch bowl...not where Apple wants to be caught as future legislative/regulatory decisions are debated.

 

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From: Brian Howell <bdho...@gmail.com>
To: Ipse Dixit <Ipse-...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 7:40 AM
Subject: [Ipse Dixit] Re: Apple hangs tough

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[Craig Good]

> On Feb 19, 2016, at 12:02 PM, jack saunders <jack...@pacbell.net> wrote:
>
> The bonehead play here was not to acknowledge the 70 cases up front, in Cook's opening salvo early this week. That's a lot of cases....presumably many variables, sortable to the public only by NSA's claim on timing -- pre and post Snowden.

They should have mentioned that.

>
> It's always important to factor in special emotional forces that drive key stakeholder subsets -- in this case, law enforcement and their lawyers. To be perceived as siding with Snowden on the public stage is tantamount to pissing in law enforcement's punch bowl...not where Apple wants to be caught as future legislative/regulatory decisions are debated.

But being on Snowden’s (really privacy’s) side is exactly where the public, and Apple’s customers, want them to be. I’m fine with a repentant corporation pivoting in the right direction. Only the feds care about their punch bowl.



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Molon Labe.

[jack saunders]

Only the feds care....and that's my point -- as Apple executives are noodling this over in Cupertino, what the feds care about is meteor bearing down on them.  

I'm with you.  I'm a Snowden man.  

Worst regret of my teaching career was the year I had a class role play the Snowden case for an entire term, each class member taking the role of an interested party.  The case actually unfolded in real time over those 16 weeks.  Fool that I was, I put the roles in plain envelopes and handed them out randomly.  And I'll be damned if the dumbest girl in the class didn't draw Edward Snowden.  (No more random picking in my life.)

 

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From: Craig Good <clg...@me.com>
To: jack saunders <jack...@pacbell.net>
Cc: Brian Howell <bdho...@gmail.com>; Ipse Dixit <Ipse-...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 12:09 PM
Subject: Re: [Ipse Dixit] Re: Apple hangs tough

[Scott Hotes]

On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 1:15 PM, jack saunders <jack...@pacbell.net> wrote:

Only the feds care....and that's my point -- as Apple executives are noodling this over in Cupertino, what the feds care about is meteor bearing down on them.  

I'm with you.  I'm a Snowden man.  

Yeah, me too, but I don't think it's quite as simple as saying that "only the feds care."  Oh that that were true!  Many entrenched corporate interests care as well.  Also, years of targeted FUD and misinformation have convinced a sizable portion of the population that there is a direct tradeoff between civil liberties and effective law enforcement.  If this is a war, I don't think our side is winning it.

Scott

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"He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."

  - Thomas Paine  

[jack saunders]

Scott's right on interested others.  AT&T collects a lot of money "cooperating with law enforcement."  That is hardly a corporate contribution to the public good.  Every last key stroke is billed for.  When I was in the industry in the last decades of the 20th century, it was a huge profit center, totally off the public radar, uncontroversial, free of aggravation.....what corporation wouldn't want such a reliable side business built into its profit planning?

 

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From: Scott Hotes <sah...@gmail.com>
To: jack saunders <jack...@pacbell.net>
Cc: Craig Good <clg...@me.com>; Brian Howell <bdho...@gmail.com>; Ipse Dixit <Ipse-...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 1:54 PM

Subject: Re: [Ipse Dixit] Re: Apple hangs tough