A backdoor in the commonly understood sense allows the government to break into a phone without physical possession of it. Cook and everyone else thinks this is a bad thing because of the government can do it a hacker can also. So a hacker in Russia say can steal your data and do other bad things.
If the exploit requires physical possession of the phone the hacker in Russia is going to have a hard time causing you grief.
Consider credit cards. If using your credit card number required physical possession of the card, we’d all be in better shape. It would not cut credit card fraud to zero, but it would eliminate mass thefts of credit card information. In this case a back door would be a government requirement for each vendor to write down your credit card information so that it could be accessed with a court order if necessary - but this makes it accessible to thieves also, and is a bad idea.
Now it is certainly possible that Apple has such a big flaw in their security that the phone could be broken into remotely, but I’ve seen no evidence of this and I don’t think they are that incompetent.
I’ve read about several potential methods that could have been used by a third party, some more plausible than others, and none involved remote access. Do you know of anyone mentioning such?
I agree. However revenge porn, as I understand it, often comes from forwarding pictures more or less legitimately acquired. If someone lets a third party have their phone or computer, and information is extracted, it is not primarily a security problem for the manufacturer.
Even back in the good old days, all the security in the world won’t help if you let random people into your computer room unsupervised. And give them unlimited to to break in.
Right, but those women (and some men, I suppose) sure wish they’d have been able to keep their nude pictures and videos secure. Whether it was hackers or their own incompetence, the damage is the same. Most hackers don’t want dick pics because they’re not valuable. But maybe the President’s is? Or corporate executives? Anyone could be blackmailed if hackers have easy access to your nudes.
The point is it’s not your decision, or the government’s, what is important to keep secure and what isn’t. It should be the FBI’s job to prevent data theft, but they’ve made clear they have no intention of doing that.
Sure. If the government knew of a vulnerability, I’d hope they’d share that with Google.
I would think protecting the privacy if its citizens is part of that mission.
Sure. Whatever. Doesn’t have anything to do with my post though. I take issue with the idea that they are so happy that the government might be able to strengthen Apple’s security but won’t. Because…? Revenge? A way to stick it to Apple?
Commonly understood by whom? A backdoor just means a method designed into a device to gain access through some means other than the standard one (the front door). That can just as easily be a local method as a remote one.
If the government is my slave, then I command them to withhold the secret of iPhone hacking.
Problem solved.
Easy. For one thing I feel a bit better if the government has a way of reading the iPhones of terrorists as long as some random person can’t use it to break into a phone sitting in my pocket. There is, after all, all sorts of precedent for the government with a court order to read things normally private.
Second, Apple definitely was giving me at least the impression of almost taunting the government by saying that their security was so good that the only way into the phone was through them, and they weren’t going to help. So, their hubris is being punished. Maybe they can ask a court to make the government tell them. 
A backdoor is provided. Driving a tank through the rear wall of a house is not the same as the builder making a hidden backdoor.
Wrong. A backdoor in the commonly understood sense allows the security to be bypassed. The extra qualifications (“the government”, “physical possession”) you shoved in are not part of the definition.
Yes; adding a backdoor would make that possible, among other bad things. Depending on whether or not the backdoor was of a specific subset that required physical access, he could use it directly or sell it to local thieves.
…and if the phone owner takes his porridge with sugar…
I see the problem; Voyager appears to be one of those people worried about terrorists:
Let’s talk about realistic risks. Millions of phones end up in someone else’s pocket. Most people use them for banking, looking up health information, etc. And every business I’ve worked for has conducted business over them. So we’re dealing with actual risks to commerce and privacy.
The government would like to use warrants to search phones in other criminal cases besides terrorism. But personally, I don’t think it’s important enough to impede security for everyone else.
Before cellphones, the internet, etc., the only way the government could access your conversations was to have an agent in the room eavesdropping. Now, even with 100% secure, encrypted phones, they have phone records and metadata. It’s not as big an improvement as the spy-hungry feds and police would like, but it’s an improvement nonetheless. If you can’t open a phone even with a warrant, that only puts you in the position of an investigator from the 70s. Civilization didn’t end then, and it won’t end now.
Part of the problem is that he isn’t worried so much about actual terrorists as he is about the cartoon caricatures on the teevee. Even a cursory study of the former reveals that iPhones simply aren’t an issue; nobody buys an expensive phone to use as a throwaway “burner” (which is the actual tactic generally used to avoid pre-attack surveillance).
Ironically, one of the risks to commerce is criminal gangs (including the financial support “tail” of terrorist groups) taking advantage of backdoors. If anything, installing backdoors into the cybersecurity infrastructure aids terrorist groups.
Which they can still do, and it will be every bit as effective now as it was then, encryption or no encryption. There is no issue of the government having less access to information, only an issue of them not having their access to information expanded as much as they might like.
I sure don’t feel better about this.
“Taunting” and “hubris”? Really? :roll eyes: And punishment! Oh brother.