What makes a phone so unique? Everything else in own possession and home can be searched with a proper warrant.
Cops have gone through papers in file cabinets for at least a century. Closets, safes, the attic, they can dig in your yard, search in the house’s crawl space, and even the suspect’s anal cavity,
Computer forensics has been a big thing for a long time. The police have software that dumps out the log files, recent browser history, images etc. I recall testimony by the forensics cop during the Casey Anthony trial. Describing the software he used and Google searches members of the family had entered. The FBI lab can do even more detailed scans of the hard drive and cache.
Why bitch about them looking at content in a smart phone?
I don’t see any difference in a file cabinet with thousands of personal papers and a phone with documents and caller history. Its personal information that has limited protections. But if a judge oks a warrant then yes, the cops have a right to that information. imho
Any possible associates aren’t dead. People that might have financed this operation aren’t dead. There’s no way to know if there were others involved without a complete investigation. Examining the phone is an important part of the process.
Well to me, a BIG difference here is that the Feds wanted to force Apple to produce something (a back door or some way to get in) that until recently everyone thought didn’t exist.
I seriously doubt Apple’s own software engineers would have any problems hacking a phone’s software that they developed. They have the source code. They know that software’s vulnerabilities.
It would be better if Apple unlocked the phone themselves. Keeping how they did it a company secret. I can understand that they don’t want to share that kind of technical information with anybody. Theres no need to do that.
Is this a problem with the new fingerprint security? If the dead suspect is on a slab in the morgue. Can they can use his finger to unlock the phone?
Obviously not or they would have. Either he had a version of iPhone that didn’t have the finger print sensor, or he didn’t set up that function or he thumb was obliterated.
I honestly think there’s probably nothing of value on that iPhone (don’t these people usually use burners anyway?)
from the start it’s all been an attempt by the FBI to have the courts set precedent that the All Writs Act applies in these cases. they claimed that it’s only about this one phone, but I don’t believe that for a second. Apple’s entire argument is not that they are incapable of doing what the FBI is demanding, it’s that the law they’re using to try to compel them is not applicable.
I have filing cabinets full of encrypted paper documents. They can certainly get a warrant to search my filing cabinets given enough probable cause. Once they have searched they are able to seize, again given a suitable warrant.
But now what: the FBI has no idea how to decrypt them. And I, the docs’ owner, am under no obligation to help them.
The phone situation is no different than this.
On the larger issues I would hold the exact opposite to the OP.
Each of us has the absolute right to be secure in our person and our possessions against any and all government intrusion. Using my own records against me is no different than compelling me to testify in court. It is, or certainly ought to be, clearly against the intent of the 5th Amendment.
Apple is DEAD RIGHT in this debate. I work in the field of cyber-security, and almost without exception, the industry is solidly behind Apple on this.
Your first mistake is assuming that ANYTHING really stays a secret. Here’s a tip; it doesn’t. Let’s say an Apple guru figures out how to hack the phone, immediately every hacker in the known universe begins trying to break into Apple’s R&D network. Hackers operate in an amazingly intricate world of the dark net, foreign nation states, and loose consortiums. One hacker finds a vulnerability, then thousands of hackers are now pounding on that one door. Irresistible force eventually wins and that secret is no longer a secret.
Apple’s main claim all along was the didn’t want to create a back door because by doing so they would tear a hole in security system that someone else (black hats) would be able to use for bad purposes. From a cybersecurity perspective that makes perfect sense.
And also, hajario is right. You don’t know what you are talking about.
The government was overreaching. I don’t believe the government has ever approached a safe or lock company and asked them for a skeleton key for their product. In effect, the government wanted to get into a safe and they demanded that the manufacturer of said safe convene a group of their engineers and design a safe cracking tool for the safe they manufactured. Now the government claims this tool will be used only once and will not cause a degradation of the manufacturers product, but do you really believe that? How will the company be reimbursed for their time? If the I Phone does lose value in the eyes of its customers and sales drop, will the government reimburse Apple for forcing them to compromise their own product?
I think it would be a dangerous precedent for the government to order a company to do work to undermine their own products. YMMV and all that.
Did the warrant mention Apple in any way? They are allowed to search most property with probable cause, but is there a legal precedent for getting the manufacturer’s help in a search? If somebody had a safe that couldn’t be opened, does the safe company get involved?
Another thing, which may be incidental, is that Apple just so happens to be a US-based company. How would the FBI approach this had it been a Samsung phone? Bring in the CIA, or start rattling Google’s or Microsoft’s cage?
I get the fight against terrorism and all that, but calling in the manufacturer on something so sensitive to one of their flagship products just feels weird.
And yet never in those years has any company been compelled to design a closet, safe, or attic opening device on behalf of the government. The FBI had the device in their possession, and were free to do with it whatever they could. They eventually did put on their big boy pants and get the access they wanted. Odd that they were able to do this so quickly after their claim that they could not do so and their attempt to set a precedent by getting Apple to do it for them met with poor results, bad publicity, and widespread opposition in the tech community.
Compare this with the telephone system. After its invention, it didn’t take long for some bright law enforcement type to notice that if he took two wires from a telephone handset and connected them to those other two wires over there, he could hear lots of interesting bad-guy stuff. Then, decades later, the phone system went and got all complicated; the FBI realized that in a digital age, they wouldn’t necessarily be able to do what they had been doing so easily, and congress passed laws requiring that phone technology be designed in such a way to permit lawful intercepts. And since then, intercept capabilities have never been abused by law enforcement or other actors in ways that wouldn’t even have been possible under the previous system. Nope, never.
It’s piss poor policy in a country that values civil rights to require that just because the police are able to do something with one system, every comparable system in the future must be saddled with design constraints to allow them to continue existing practices. Do we need or value ever-expanding police powers?
If you want an absolute right to be secure from government searches, you’re going to have to start a political movement to amend the 4th Amendment, which expressly provides that government agents can search your private papers, provided they do so on a search warrant issued based on probable cause:
And no, having your own papers and records entered in court is not the same as compelling you to testify. The basis against self-incrimination is the idea that you yourself cannot be forced to testify. It’s never been extended to documents.
I agree that’s what the 4th & 5th actually mean today and have pretty much since the beginning.
What I really meant was warrants are what they are and are a societally good thing provided we’ve got a decent judicial cadre, not a bunch of police stooges. Which is usually true in the US today, other than what we suspect about the realities of FISA courts.
But records ought to be sacrosanct. For the same reasons that prohibitions against compelled testimony are. The odds of that change happening in this country are just about zero.
The OP’s presentation of the issues suggests some confusion.
Apple’s position was generally related to opposing the government use of the All Writs Act to force them to create a version of the iOS operating system that eliminated certain hacking protections, to make it easier to unlock the phone and thereby decrypt the data. In addition, we can presume they would also oppose a new law that properly required them to act thusly. In other words, they opposed both the use of the All Writs Act to do something not properly under its reach, and opposed the end goal sought.
This has little to do with searches justified under probable cause. The FBI had an uncontested ability to search the phone. Their search revealed encrypted data. The issue was compelling Apple to assist them in decrypting the data.
The other issue that arise above and deserves discussion is: can a subpoena require a person to reveal his password? Courts have come down on both sides of this issue. There is a great deal of interesting and persuasive argument for and against this proposition.
