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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Apple's iPhone encrypts everything, including the password that you need to get in. IIRC, if you try the wrong password three times, the phone gets locked. It's a security feature against your phone getting lost and then hacked.

The FBI has the iPhone used by the shooter in San Bernadino, Syed Farook but claim they're unable to break the encryption without Apples' help.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/18/technology/apple-timothy-cook-fbi-sa
n-bernardino.html

The reality is that the FBI could break the phone today - in fact, they've probably already broken the phone. The reason why they engage is this charade is because they want a LEGAL program to break encryption on ANYONE's phone, not just this one.

And the reason why Apple's Tim Cook is engaging in this charade is because it gives them publicity that their phone's security system is unbreakable.

And where does Obama stand???

Ever the snoop and ever the destroyer of the Fourth Amendment, he wants Apple to comply.

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Originally posted by ElvisChrist:
Apple says it *DOES NOT* have the ability to break its own encryption, and that's the part that virtually everybody is chafing at, unable to believe in the even the remotest possibility that any software company anywhere, ever, could *possibly* deliberately design an encryption algorithm that they themselves would be unable to break. Everybody builds in a back door, we're told, and it's become entrenched tribal knowledge that there's no such thing as unbreakable security. But what if Apple did it? What if they figured it out and really fucking actually *DID IT*?

Is it breakable? Sure, at some point. Put all of the NSA's supercomputers on it at the same time and brute-force the fucker, and you could probably break it in a few billion tries. But Apple screwed them there, too - if you try and fail ten times, the phone wipes itself clean, and all the data is irrevocably lost.

Here are some pertinent questions:

1) Has Apple been guaranteed a blanket immunity if they put their hands on this phone and it gets wiped? In other words, if they try to break its encryption and fail, are they going to be held up on destruction of evidence or obstruction of justice charges? If that's even a possibility, I'd tell the DOJ to fuck off.

2) Is there a possibility to crack *THIS* phone, just this individual one, that doesn't also give the NSA/DOJ/CIA/FBI and every other alphabet-soup gang of goons access to every similar phone on the planet? If there isn't, then they can fuck off.

3) Why hasn't the FBI just called Anonymous or Edward Snowden? ;) After all, they were able to get "secure" information out of supposedly unhackable systems many, many times in the past.

This is once again government overreach, just like torture was, and they're trying to sell us on their line of bullshit by telling us that there's a metaphorical ticking time tomb in downtown Los Angeles, or some similar line of crap. Is there information on the phone that might be useful? Maybe. Will forcing Apple to hand over the key - if it even possesses such a thing or the ability to invent such a thing - put everybody else's private data at risk? Definitely.

I'll take the certainty over the possibility on this one, and err on the side of privacy.

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It was already known that Microsoft used two keys, a primary and a spare, either of which can create valid signatures. Microsoft had failed to remove the debugging symbols in ADVAPI32.DLL, a security and encryption driver, when it released Service Pack 5 for Windows NT 4.0, and Andrew Fernandes, chief scientist with Cryptonym, found the primary key stored in the variable _KEY and the second key was labeled _NSAKEY. ... In addition, Dr. Nicko van Someren found a third key in Windows 2000, which he doubted had a legitimate purpose, and declared that "It looks more fishy".

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