Shock: the Government Is Still Trying to Eliminate Privacy Rights

Silicon Valley celebrated last fall when the White House revealed it would not seek legislation forcing technology makers to install “backdoors” in their software. [...] But while the companies may have thought that was the final word, in fact the government was working on a Plan B.

  Bloomberg

It's like Whack-a-Mole. And dont't bother telling me that thy actually discontinued torture, black ops prisons, TIA or anything else they've been called to account on. Because they just go underground for a while, rename programs, and keep going.

In a secret meeting convened by the White House around Thanksgiving, senior national security officials ordered agencies across the U.S. government to find ways to counter encryption software and gain access to the most heavily protected user data on the most secure consumer devices.

[...]

The approach was formalized in a confidential National Security Council “decision memo,” tasking government agencies with developing encryption workarounds, estimating additional budgets and identifying laws that may need to be changed. [...] Details of the memo reveal that, in private, the government was honing a sharper edge to its relationship with Silicon Valley alongside more public signs of rapprochement.

[...]

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Wednesday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice have the Obama administration’s “full” support in the matter.

Of course they do. The most transparent administration ever.^TM

The government is “not asking Apple to redesign its product or to create a new backdoor to their products,” but rather are seeking entry “to this one device,” he said.

And next: the hundreds of  iPhones being held in vaults (175 in Manhattan alone). Because the fix they want from Apple isn't specific to this phone. They're just saying they only want to use it on this one phone. Sure. Sure.

 

I heard a snippet on the radio recently that the Feds are saying they'll let Apple hold onto the software they want them to develop. Yeah, that makes all the difference.  They're going to have possession of the phone with the software installed.  The operating system doesn't sit on the same partition as the private data. Once they're in that phone, they can't copy its OS?  Surely I misheard.

You're phone is perfectly secure. Don't worry. Besides, you're not doing anything wrong. 

Security specialists say the case carries enormous consequences, for privacy and the competitiveness of U.S. businesses, and [...] shows that technology companies underestimated the resolve of the U.S. government to access encrypted data.

[...]

Robert Knake, a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations who formerly served as White House Director of Cybersecurity Policy [noted], “They said they wouldn’t seek to legislate ‘backdoors’ in these technologies. They didn’t say they wouldn’t try to access the data in other ways.”

Trust me. I'm from the government.  We still have to learn that?

“The government’s going to have to get over it,” said Ken Silva, former technical director of the National Security Agency and currently a vice president at Ionic Security Inc., an Atlanta-based data security company. “We had this fight 20 years ago. While I respect the job they have to do and I know how hard the job is, the privacy of that information is very important to people.”

They don't have to get over anything.  Twenty years ago was before "9/11 changed everything."

I have a question: doesn't the government not have developers who could create that operating system themselves? I'm sure it would cost a pretty penny, but would it be more expensive than the lawsuit they're pursuing? Perhaps they just want to bust Apple's balls and let everyone else know there's no percentage in fighting the machine.

Apple infuriated law enforcement when it announced in 2014 that it would encrypt data stored on users’ iPhones and iPads with a PIN code that the company could not access, even if ordered to by a judge. Prior to that decision, the FBI and local police agencies routinely sent seized devices to Apple to extract data relevant to their investigations.

And now, it's time for Apple to pay for that act of defiance.

Resistance is futile.