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Originally Posted by dr.strangelove
...If the FBI wants to do it, let them do it. It is not the duty of any citizen, business or human, to help the FBI.
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Originally Posted by phetaroi
When I think of the millions of people over the centuries who have fought and died and otherwise sacrificed for their country, to hear a statement like yours make me sick to my stomach.
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As a former soldier, who has made some of those sacrifices (though fortunately not dead, but coming close more than once), your response makes *me* sick.
When we take the Oath of Service, we do not swear to protect the FBI or any other agency. We swear to "
...protect and defend the Constitution...from all enemies...foreign and domestic..."
The rights and freedoms of the citizens, guaranteed by the Constitution, take precedence over the desires of the FBI and other government agencies to intrude on the lives and rights of the citizens. I did not serve, fight and sacrifice to see this country turned into a Communist/Fascist/whatever dictatorship/police state where the citizens are forced to do whatevertheheck the FBI or any other police agency says, where they have unlimited power to do as they please in complete disregard for the Constitution.
While I am certainly not displeased to see these terrorist get whacked, and I would not be unhappy to see their comrades utterly annihilated, doing so at the expense of our own rights and freedoms is simply NOT acceptable. I see little difference in the end results of the terrorist using guns and bombs, and the FBI's attempts at wielding their version of terrorism. (Ya, I went there.)
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Originally Posted by jbgusa
Is plotting mass murder a "private matter"? The owners of this phone have already committed a crime. They opened fire at a holiday party. They forfeited their rights.
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That's right, the terrorists forfeited their rights, in the most permanent way. What they did is done, as are they.
But we are not talking about *their* rights. We are talking about the rights of millions of US citizens and their Constitutional protections against illegal search and seizure (and others). We are not talking about the FBI getting into *ONE* phone, but getting into *EVERY* phone...whenever they feel like it.
This is not about the data on one device. Do you know how they analyze the contents of a hard drive? They CLONE the drive and examine the cloned data so that they do not damage the original or run the risk of booting the drive and needing to find passwords and break encryption, and if failing having the contents wiped. They can make as many clones as they want/need, and examine the data, and attempt to break any encryption scheme that might be there.
They could do that with the phone too- remove the chips so that they are separated from the operating system which cannot then delete the data, read the data in the registers of the chips and reproduce it in EEPROMS or any other method that is suitable, and then they would be free to make all the attempts to break the encryption that their little hearts desired. They do not need Apple's permission or assistance for this, and they have massive amounts of computing power available, together with their own squad of geeks.
They could even buy a bunch of similar phones, and experiment with them to their hearts' content, with impunity and no danger of destroying any of the data on the terrorist's phone. Perhaps they already have. Perhaps, it would even be possible to swap chips into an unlocked phone and read the data (I don't know anything about how the Apple devices work, I'm just pulling this out of my butt...but the thought comes from the fact that I have done this with other devices). I don't think it would be impossible to clone the chips, and phone as many times as they wanted, and go through all the possible combinations until they hit the right one and unlocked the data, without destroying the original.
So, what is it, that they REALLY want?
I'm guessing that the Apple encryption scheme exceeds 256-bit AES and they have been unable to crack it. I'll go out on a limb and guess further, that the encryption scheme is strong enough that it would take quantum computers (that haven't been invented yet) to be able to break it in a reasonable amount of time.
So, probably, what they REALLY want, is for Apple to give up the details of the encryption scheme and make them a key that will open EVERY Apple phone and bypass the security.
I suspect that it is, in fact, not possible for Apple to do this, but the short-sighted, narrow-minded feebs don't want to believe it. The fact is, that there already exist in the public domain encryption schemes exceeding 2,048 bits that even all of the supercomputers owned by the gov, working in parallel, without years of dedicated time to that single task. There has been no limit on the development of such schemes- only on the export of them to other countries.
*I* think, that failing in a brute-force attack on the phone, they are engaging in a brute-force attack on the company instead...and, perhaps, not coincidentally, a brute-force attack on the rights of ALL citizens.
This must not be allowed. It will be a sad day indeed for this country if the courts do not stop this...ordinarily, I would have been reasonably sure that the Supreme Court would strike it down quickly, if it made it there, but the absence of Mr. Scalia leaves me less confident.
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Originally Posted by jbgusa
It should be less secure. Would anyone have argued, back in the day of pay phones, that pay phones shouldn't be monitored for criminal activity?
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They absolutely would. The fact remains that even though the phones were publicly available, there was still an expectation of privacy by the citizens using them, which would require a search warrant in order to be able to tap them. Such a warrant would be excessively broad because it would violate the rights of many [innocent] citizens, including the right to due process, and it would amount to an unconstitutional search of citizens who were not suspected of anything unless there were a way to ensure that ONLY the calls made by the suspect named in the warrant were recorded.
Do you know of any cases of such a warrant to tap a public pay-phone being issued? I have never heard of it being done. In fact, the US Supreme Court ruled 7-1 in favor of Katz (one justice did not vote), in the 1967 case Katz v. United States, that the recording of his calls, even though the device was affixed to the exterior of the phone booth, amounted to a violation of the 4th Amendment and constituted a warrantless search. The majority opinion affirmed the expectation of privacy even though the device in question was a public pay phone.
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Originally Posted by jbgusa
Why would the government want to listen in on honest citizens? Remember the abuse in Watergate and with the Nixon Plumbers wasn't the gathering of information, it was its politicization.
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Are you really that naive? They would listen to (and watch) *everyone* if they could...and that is the very reason why our rights are enumerated in the Constitution as they are. I have worked/trained with personnel from a number of agencies, and I can assure you that there are a frightening number who would stop at nothing to monitor anyone and everyone, regardless of being suspected of a crime, if they thought they could get away with it. In fact, *some* have been *caught* doing it, and exposed, creating considerable uproar, consternation and outrage among the citizens. Where have you been that you have not seen this?
If it were not for the Constitution, and vigilance by the ACLU and others, I have no doubt that we would be living as in George Orwell's '1984'. Sadly, recent actions such as the so-called 'Patriot' Act have sent us further down that road despite the good arguments against it. If this thing against Apple is upheld, it will be one more step down that very bad road.