Apple Vs FBI – Is It Over?

You probably know that the FBI sued Apple to break the cell phone used by one of the San Bernardino terrorists. To order Apple to do this, the “Law of all mandates” was used. The All Mandates Act, passed more than 225 years ago, is essentially a way to create a lawsuit by the federal police when there are no other legal grounds to do so.

As you probably also know, Apple refused at first and took a while to craft an answer to the court so it wouldn’t have to give in to the feds’ demands. And as you may know, some unknown company, individual, or group (currently believed to be professional gray hat hackers) gave the FBI a method to crack it themselves.

So what is the problem here? Apple had cracked many iPhones for the FBI before.

What was at stake was one of Apple’s main selling points, and that is the security of its flagship device. Apple has cracked its devices in cooperation with government requests before, but in this case, the device was one of the newer iPhones, a 5C. Apple added security to this phone so that even they couldn’t crack it and they wouldn’t have a record of your password.

To break the phone, the FBI told Apple to create a one-time update that would allow (in all likelihood) infinite attempts to log into the phone without crashing. Currently, if too many attempts are made with incorrect codes, the phone locks the user for hours, days or months and in some cases could erase the data on the phone.

So why does it matter if Apple creates this backdoor on a guy’s phone?

There are a couple more issues at stake.

First, if Apple created such a backdoor, it would only be a matter of time until it was “in the wild.” In no time, piracy would proliferate and nobody’s phone would be safe from prying eyes from the government or criminals, including other terrorists!

Second, many people with knowledge in the fields of security and privacy believe that the NSA had the means and probably would have offered it to the FBI, but that the FBI was simply not interested.

Why not? Because forcing Apple to create a backdoor in its security would set a precedent that would allow the FBI to force all technology companies to breach its security as well.

Why would we care if our own government is capable of circumventing security at all?

Well, the concept is a bit scary for this author right from the start. But that’s not the only reason to be suspicious of handing over all of our privacy to our own law enforcement agencies. Once the security / encryption cat is out of the bag, then it is conceivable that all privacy becomes a thing of the past, for our own government, for foreign governments, for scammers and criminals, for terrorists and bullies. It is believed that we would open a very dark Pandora’s box.

So the FBI now has the means to crack that terrorist’s iPhone. Can you do everyone’s thing?

No, at least not yet. IPhones newer than the 5C use a different form of encryption that is probably not yet cracked. And while the FBI will likely not tell Apple how the crack worked, Apple will continue to design stronger security to integrate into its devices.

Also, this particular 5C used one of the weaker types of passwords. Selecting a stronger and longer password might have stumped the methods used this time.

The FBI dropped its case against Apple, this time. But since September 2015, the Agency Director has been adamant about the problems that strong encryption can cause when there is a case involving national security. And this defense against strong encryption has been brought to the halls of Congress.

As I write this article, Congress is drafting a bill against encryption. It has not yet been put to a vote and there is no guarantee that it will pass. there are supporters and detractors on both sides.

Sen. Wyden of Oregon (widely considered liberal) said: “For the first time in America, companies that want to provide their customers with stronger security would not have that option; they would have to decide how to weaken their products to make you less secure.” .

A member of the Cato Institute (widely considered conservative) said: “Burr-Feinstein may be the craziest thing you have ever seen seriously offered as a piece of legislation. It is ‘doing magic’ in legal terms.”

So it’s not over. In fact, the case has brought to light a public battle for its very existence. It’s not over yet.