Did the feds think ignoring the laws could go on indefinitely, without anyone pushing back?
WASHINGTON — Devoted customers of Apple products these days worry about whether the new iPhone 6 will bend in their jean pockets. The National Security Agency and the nation’s law enforcement agencies have a different concern: that the smartphone is the first of a post-Snowden generation of equipment that will disrupt their investigative abilities.
The phone encrypts emails, photos and contacts based on a complex mathematical algorithm that uses a code created by, and unique to, the phone’s user — and that Apple says it will not possess.
The result, the company is essentially saying, is that if Apple is sent a court order demanding that the contents of an iPhone 6 be provided to intelligence agencies or law enforcement, it will turn over gibberish, along with a note saying that to decode the phone’s emails, contacts and photos, investigators will have to break the code or get the code from the phone’s owner.
Breaking the code, according to an Apple technical guide, could take “more than 5 1/2 years to try all combinations of a six-character alphanumeric passcode with lowercase letters and numbers.” (Computer security experts question that figure, because Apple does not fully realize how quickly the N.S.A. supercomputers can crack codes.)
Already the new phone has led to an eruption from the director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey. At a news conference on Thursday devoted largely to combating terror threats from the Islamic State, Mr. Comey said, “What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to hold themselves beyond the law.”
“Did the feds think ignoring the….?” they did until Snowden spilled the beans. Speaking about pushing back, what did we learn from Obama last night on 60 Minutes? Either James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, is completely incompetent or he’s been working a game on the American people. “U.S. intelligence underestimated what had been taking place in Syria” and Iraq said Obama. The CIA has been training “moderate” Syrian fighters inside Syria for two plus years. The world’s largest spying facility (5000 people) is located in Baghdad which is about 469 miles due west of the Syrian capital in Damascus. We are being lied to on a grand scale. The question is who is lying? Obama or Clapper? The smart money is on Obama and the plutocrats who Clapper works for.
“What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to hold themselves beyond the law.”
Irony deficient, I guess.
what law is it that says I have to give you all my private affairs/letters/effects whenever you want? That seems to contradict something I read about the foundations, fundamentals, construction, character, oh yeah ‘Constitution’ of this country.
This only means the data on your iphone is encrypted. If you backup to icloud or itunes, Apple has the keys to that and can give your data to whomever same as before.
So Apple is not to be believed, just as the govt. is not to be believed.
Don’t worry about any of it. The whole of civilization is about to collapse from multiple dilemmas we’ve gotten ourselves into – not least of which are overpopulation, pollution of the entire biosphere, lack of potable water, methane release added to record breaking CO2 concentration in the atmosphere which in turn leads to warming seas (making life in the oceans more difficult), warming land, and chaotic weather (all of which make growing enough food “problematic”). Now add to those: economic problems like currency wars, resource scarcity, disease outbreaks, war, and of course radiation. There are still more, but you get the idea – it ain’t gonna go on for more than another generation, IF THAT.
The psychopaths are in charge so anything goes now (on the way down and out protecting the status quo).
Civilization isn’t going to collapse. The Capitalist economic system is about to collapse however. Now, if one equates civilization with Capitalism then perhaps one will conclude that civilization has collapsed. Certainly the oligarchy (1%) whose vast wealth is going to disappear will see the whole thing as a collapse of civilization. But the 99% will notice an improvement in the quality of their lives once the old order ceases to exist.