Wednesday, February 24, 2016

New Apple iPhone Being Developed That Will Make It Impossible For Government to Break Into Phones, BUT...

Apple engineers are developing new security measures that will make it impossible for the government to break into a locked iPhone using methods similar to those now at the center of a court fight in California, according to people close to the company and security experts, reports NYT.

Says NYT:
If Apple succeeds in upgrading its security — and experts say it almost surely will — the company would create a significant technical challenge for law enforcement agencies, even if the Obama administration wins its fight over access to data stored on an iPhone used by one of the killers in last year’s San Bernardino, Calif., rampage. The F.B.I. would then have to find another way to defeat Apple security, setting up a new cycle of court fights and, yet again, more technical fixes by Apple....Each iPhone has a built-in troubleshooting system that lets the company update the system software without the need for a user to enter a password. Apple designed that feature to make it easier to repair malfunctioning phones.
The only way out of this back-and-forth, experts say, is for Congress to get involved. 
This last sentence worries me. Is this battle a Trojan Horse to get Congress to force companies to provide access to secured personal data on cell phones etc?

  -RW

1 comment:

  1. Yes IMO It's clearly and obviously about forcing companies to cooperate with government demands. To spread out the spying load and increase the amount of information available. One phone is not an issue, hundreds of millions or billions of devices is a huge issue. They need more resources to accomplish a greater degree of monitoring and logging.

    The NSA with their existing operations coupled with standard court orders for phone records should have just about everything useful from that phone. For what remains, what is locally stored, the government also has the resources to crack a single phone in their possession if they want to make the effort. When physical security is compromised security of the data becomes a matter of resources and time.

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