Apple praised by Google, damned by Lee Rigby family for FBI refusal

“This week Apple was ordered by a US court to provide ‘reasonable technical assistance’ to authorities to allow the FBI to access [the terrorist who murdered 14 people in San Bernardino, California, Syed] Farook’s iPhone. But Apple refused the ‘chilling’ court order in a open letter to its customers written by CEO Tim Cook. He warned that the court order sets a ‘dangerous precedent’. That refusal to co-operate drew condemnation from the family of Fusilier Lee Rigby, the soldier who was brutally murdered by extremists in 2013 outside his London barracks.”

“‘The government is asking Apple to hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers—including tens of millions of American citizens—from sophisticated hackers and cybercriminals,’ said Cook. ‘The same engineers who built strong encryption into the iPhone to protect our users would, ironically, be ordered to weaken those protections and make our users less safe.’

“‘We can find no precedent for an American company being forced to expose its customers to a greater risk of attack,’ said Cook. ‘For years, cryptologists and national security experts have been warning against weakening encryption. Doing so would hurt only the well-meaning and law-abiding citizens who rely on companies like Apple to protect their data.’”

“Self-proclaimed cybersecurity legend John McAfee has offered to help the FBI run an end-around on Apple in the case of an iPhone that was used by the San Bernardino shooters last December. … ‘No matter how you slice this pie, if the government succeeds in getting this back door, it will eventually get a back door into all encryption, and our world, as we know it, is over,’ McAfee wrote in the op-ed. … In his Business Insider op-ed, cybersecurity expert McAfee suggests that cyberscience is a talent, not a learned skill, and that a ‘room full of Stanford computer science graduates cannot compete with a true hacker without even a high-school education.’ With the assistance of a team of these ‘true hackers,’ McAfee promises that he will, free of charge, crack the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone in less than a month.”

“‘There is no question that what the FBI has asked Apple to do is create a backdoor,’ McAfee said to RT America’s Ed Schultz. He disputed the bureau’s argument that only one phone used by one of the San Bernardino mass shooters would be affected. … The FBI is ‘asking every owner of an iPhone to make their phone susceptible to bad hackers and more importantly foreign enemies of the United States like China,’ McAfee said.”

“In a presidential race that has Washington outsiders at the forefront, computer programmer and entrepreneur John McAfee may be the most outside of all. He thinks that American leadership is ill-equipped to deal with the cyber threats facing the country. ‘What’s needed more than anything else is competent leadership in the area of technology. Our Congressmen and Senators and President can barely spell the word cyberscience,’ McAfee told RT. McAfee is definitely not a politician. He is a computer scientist and businessman who started the company that produced the first commercial antivirus software back in the 1980s. This may be more of a boon than anything in a presidential field that has businesspeople, a neurosurgeon, and a self-described socialist topping the polls.”

“He said Americans have always made privacy trade-offs with the government when it comes to public safety…. ‘This notion that somehow our data is different, and can be walled off from those other trade-offs we make, I believe is incorrect,’ said Obama, speaking in front of about 2,000 people in Austin, Texas, during South by Southwest, the first time a sitting president has ever spoken at the 30-year-old tech, music and film festival. ‘You cannot take an absolutist view on this,’ he said. ‘The dangers are real.’”

“In a filing late Monday, federal prosecutors asked to delay a much-anticipated court hearing set for Tuesday over the FBI's demand for Apple to help unlock Syed Rizwan Farook’s encrypted phone. An ‘an outside party’ came forward over the weekend and showed the FBI a possible method for unlocking the phone, according to the filing. Authorities need time to determine ‘whether it is a viable method that will not compromise data" on the phone.”

“The FBI recently threatened Apple with legal action unless it agreed to open up a terrorists’ iPhone. But it turns out that a £120 device would done the job for them. The Mail on Sunday managed to crack an iPhone in just six hours using a gadget called an IP Box. It works by guessing the four digit password which protects Apple’s smartphone. ‘It is the same technology the FBI got access to crack the passcode on the San Bernardino device,’ said Mark Strachan, director of a firm called Fone Fun Shop, which sells the gizmo. ‘We already supply forensic tools to law enforcement within the UK and worldwide and decided to introduce it into our line of products. There are certain scenarios where this kind of technology is needed to help people for the right reasons, it’s not all bad.’”

“It remains to be seen why investigators caused so much fuss when the solution was so simple.”

“The FBI doesn’t have to identify the company it contracted with to hack an iPhone used by one of the terrorists involved in the 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, a federal judge ruled Saturday. Three news organizations sued the FBI a year ago under the Freedom of Information Act to learn the name of the company it hired to hack into the iPhone 5C or how much it paid that vendor. But US District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled Saturday that information is exempt from mandatory disclosure under the government transparency law.… Chutkan said the the vendor’s networks are not as sophisticated as the FBI’s and releasing its name could put the company at greater risk of being hacked itself.”

“An outside contractor with established ties to the FBI has most likely shown investigators how to circumvent the iPhone’s security measures by copying the contents of the device’s flash storage, a forensics expert said today. Called ‘NAND mirroring,’ the technique relies on using numerous copies of the iPhone storage to input possible passcodes until the correct one is found. ‘The other ideas, I’ve kind of ruled out,’ said Jonathan Zdziarski in an interview. Zdziarski is a noted iPhone forensics and security expert. ‘None of them seemed to fit.’”