FBI Had No Way To Access Locked iPhone After Terror Attack, Watchdog Finds (zdnet.com) 126
The FBI did not have the technical capability to access an iPhone used by one of the terrorists behind the San Bernardino shooting, a Justice Department watchdog has found. ZDNet: A report by the department's Office of Inspector General sheds new light on the FBI's efforts to gain access to the terrorist's phone. It lands almost exactly a year after the FBI dropped a legal case against Apple, which had refused a demand by the government to build a backdoor that would've bypassed the encryption on the shooter's iPhone. Apple said at the time that if it was forced to backdoor one of its products, it would "set a dangerous precedent." Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, killed 14 people in the southern Californian town in December 2015. The 11-page report said that the FBI "had no such capability" to access the contents of Farook's encrypted iPhone, amid concerns that there were conflicting claims about whether the FBI may have had techniques to access the device by the time it had filed a suit against Apple. Those claims were mentioned in affidavits in the court case, as well as in testimony by former FBI director James Comey.
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For the love of deity, someone invent unicode!!!!
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It's already invented, but Slashdot is still stuck in 1988.
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There was a backup. The phone belonged to the terrorist's public employer who were cooperating to provide access. The FBI requested that San Bernardino reset the phone password which then caused the phone to stop syncing data which had not yet been backed up (correct and expected behavior).
Reporting on this topic is counter productive. (Score:5, Insightful)
Continuing to discuss this topic just plays into the hands of people who want to take your rights away. By keeping the discussion going for years they start to normalize the idea that there is something to discuss - i.e. that both sides have merit. They don't. It is just a case of one side having no point but refusing to die. But by keeping the articles flowing the public starts to get the subtle "both sides must have a point" message.
You aren't just stepping onto the slippery slope, you are helping them spread the crisco. Just stop.
Have to slap down the idiots (Score:3, Insightful)
Continuing to discuss this topic just plays into the hands of people who want to take your rights away.
If you don't discuss the topic then the people who want to remove your rights will succeed in doing so. Heck we're still having to argue against idiots who think racism is good, vaccines are bad, homeopathy is effective, climate change isn't real, the moon landings were a hoax, evolution is a "theory", etc. If you don't engage the idiots and slap them down then the idiots will win by default.
Unfortunately we have a lot of news media that continue to present every story as if there are two equally valid si
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Maybe start weaning yourself (and others) off 'news' and TV more generally - if you can't stop them from spreading outright nonsense, you can at least stop listening to it.
The problem with boycotts (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe start weaning yourself (and others) off 'news' and TV more generally - if you can't stop them from spreading outright nonsense, you can at least stop listening to it.
Pretending idiots don't exist will result in the idiots winning. Boycotts don't work unless they involve enough people to really make a difference and to get that you have to have already changed minds rendering the boycott pointless. Worthwhile to try to convince others to listen to credible news sources but tuning out without ensuring others are tuning out too is a Bad Idea.
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Even if I choose not to smear myself in shit, it still exists - it's a choice though.
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It's good to be king, at least for a while.
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The problem is listening to it. Once you stop, the problem will have gone away, yes.
Theory versus "theory" (Score:2)
Ummm, evolution is absolutely a scientific theory.
It is a theory (meaning model), not a "theory" (meaning unproven). Evolution is only a "theory" in the syntactic sense as used to describe scientific arguments. That's why I used the quotes. People who argue against it argue that it is a "theory" using a different definition of the term theory to disingenuously argue that it somehow is still an open question as to whether it is real. In reality it is about as debatable as whether gravity exists.
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The people who stand to lose extraordinary profits from - just as a "for instance" - world economies turning away from fossil fuel-based energy and transportation systems are a different and very much more pernicious matter. They know they're presenting misleading arguments, and they couldn't care less.
I don't think this is actually true. Oh, perhaps it's true of someone somewhere, but not most. The true explanation is both less cynical and more useful: confirmation bias. People who want to believe something (and financial motivation is a good reason to want to believe something) have a startling ability to ignore or pick apart evidence that they don't like, and uncritically accept evidence they do like. And contrary to what you might expect, intelligence and education increase the ability of people to do
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Ummm, evolution is absolutely a scientific theory. That means it has be been repeatedly tested and proven to be true using the scientific method.
No. The core premise of science is that theories can only be falsified, never proven. Every theory is always open for refutation by new observations.
What you should say about evolution is that it's one of the most thoroughly tested theories in scientific history, having been scrutinized from a broad variety of perspectives and disciplines across both the life sciences and the physical sciences, without discovery of any countervailing evidence.
Though what I prefer to say is "Evolution is a theory the sam
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If you don't discuss the topic then the people who want to remove your rights will succeed in doing so
What rights exactly are you referring to? What is the difference between the FBI reading a dead gunman's postal mail, and the FBI having Apple send an over the air update to unlock the dead gunman's phone. They already had full authority to seize all of the gunman's correspondence. I guess it makes us feel better that Apple didn't want to comply, but then aren't we just pinning our hopes on the whims of a corporation?
Rather, it seems the sole reason they chose not to comply with the FBI was to continue the
Backdoors are always a terrible idea (Score:5, Insightful)
What rights exactly are you referring to? What is the difference between the FBI reading a dead gunman's postal mail, and the FBI having Apple send an over the air update to unlock the dead gunman's phone.
If I really need to explain that to you please hand in your geek card. Breaking the encryption on the iPhone renders ALL encryption on the iPhone useless. It isn't just the government we are worried about here. If the US government can get into my correspondence then so can malware makers, foreign governments, thieves, etc. Any process used to open one iPhone effectively opens ALL iPhones. If I have to explain why that is bad then you need to go get some education before this discussion goes any further.
They already had full authority to seize all of the gunman's correspondence.
Authority != Ability. Furthermore there are civil rights issues in play here that extend FAR beyond the gunman's correspondence. I'm not worried particularly about the gunman. I'm worried about MY rights. We have limits on law enforcement because they have a LONG history of abusing their authority.
If he had a storage unit, would you oppose the FBI compelling them to hand over the key?
Him handing over a key to his storage locker does not render my storage locker accessible to thieves. Seriously? You don't see the difference?
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The government suggests this tool could only be used once, on one phone. But that’s simply not true. Once created, the technique could be used over and over again, on any number of devices. In the physical world, it would be the equivalent of a master key, capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks — from restaurants and banks to stores and homes. No reasonable person would find that acceptable.
He obviously had the PR department go over this with him. "The FBI wants us to apply dev firmware to a single phone in a controlled environment? Let's say it's a hacker tool that will get out on the internet and put everyone at risk." It really seems most likely that the reason Apple resisted this court order was because they wish for you to think your data is safe from them when, in reality, they have not
Breaking encryption (Score:2)
I don't buy the argument that unlocking one phone is tantamount to a backdoor to all phones.
Then you don't understand the technology at work. With any encryption if you break it on one device you have de-facto broken it on every device that shares that encryption system. That's how it works like it or not. It is analogous to the act of creating a key. If you hand a key to a third party (even a trusted one) that key can (and probably will) be copied without your knowledge or consent. If there is a backdoor with a weak or nonexistent key there is no way to hide it so that only the "good" guys ha
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That costs them money
1. Yes, in sales
or indeed they would have to cut back security on their phones
2. That's the illusion
which their customers wouldn't like.
3. See #1
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Well, evolution IS a theory. It's just the theory that's currently the most likely to accurately explain the origin of species.
LK
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Kinda like the anti-gunners, the ones that want to eventually get rid of the 2A.
I've just never before thought that so many of the US citizenry would be united in forcefully fighting to reduce their own rights on so many different fronts.
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Oddly enough, there are very few trying to ban all guns. I've found that sticking most gun-owning conservatives in a room with most reform-minded liberals and keeping the tone calm gets you a bunch of people who all have the same ideals and goals.
There are a few folks over at NGRA and way, way off to the left who think we should eliminate all background checks and automatic weapons bans or that we should ban all firearms unconditionally in the entire nation. 90% of the country thinks they're nuts, but hal
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No more school shootings, mall shootings, synagogue shootings, church shootings, or shootings in general is a good thing.
So you think criminals will comply? HA!
A gun ban or heavy restriction will simply add another item to drug cartel's and street gang's menu of available illegal goods for sale for them to profit hugely from. No background checks or age limits, nor any restrictions on fully-automatic firearms, RPGs, grenades, landmines, etc etc etc.
But hey, prohibitions & criminalization have worked so well vs alcohol and drugs, right?
Maybe you should look up the definition of insanity.
Then have yourself committed to an i
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Molon Labe, bitch.
Oh, wait, lemme guess - you're only for gun confiscation as long as someone else is the person risking their lives to take guns from people.
Sounds about right.
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The issue isn't "keeping retards" from getting guns. The problem is that WHATEVER gun rights restrictions get enacted is NEVER ENOUGH.
Not true - If you were to get gun deaths down to similar rates-per-ten-thousand that you see in Canada, the UK, Australia, et al most gun control advocates would quiet right down. Sure, you'd still have the fringe ones who'd want to see things like they have in Japan, but they'd just be fringes.
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The issue isn't "keeping retards" from getting guns. The problem is that WHATEVER gun rights restrictions get enacted is NEVER ENOUGH.
Not true - If you were to get gun deaths down to similar rates-per-ten-thousand that you see in Canada, the UK, Australia,.
It's really hard to keep people from committing suicide.
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It's really hard to keep people from committing suicide.
In many cases the urge to act passes relatively quickly. Removing or reducing access to an easy and immediate way to commit suicide reduces the number of people who actually succeed in committing suicide. You won't stop it, and some portion of people who would have committed suicide with a gun will find another means, but you will reduce it.
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It's really hard to keep people from committing suicide.
In many cases the urge to act passes relatively quickly. Removing or reducing access to an easy and immediate way to commit suicide reduces the number of people who actually succeed in committing suicide.
And you base this claim on what scientific studies or industry experience?
Personally, I've been down that road and barely survived. Suicidal thoughts aren't something that just pop in your head and right back out. I spent years fighting with depression and suicidal ideations myself, and I know I'm far from alone.
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I have and continue to struggle with chronic depression, including extended periods of suicidal ideation. To be frank, my own experience sounds closer to your own (in as much as such a brief description can tell me) - I am more familiar with a constant, extended period of suicidal 'desire' than I am with short lived, but perhaps more acute urges.
I am deeply sympathetic to your own experience and while I expect that there's a degree of commonality in what we and others go through, I don't expect that my own
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I think of it this way - Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, and zero guns in private hands. In fact if you look up the list of countries ranked by suicide rate, [wikipedia.org] most of the nations that outrank the US in terms of suicides per capita are places with extreme restrictions on private firearm ownership. So based on the statistics that are available it seems there is a strong lack of correlation between private ownership of firearms and suicide rates.
To wit: Guns are messy, shooting yourself
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If gun control in the UK, Aus, and Canada is "enough", then why do their governments keep pushing for more?
Because as those nations further urbanize, the voters demand it. Most city-dwelling Canadians and Brits see no need for people to own guns.
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Caveats; I'm Australian and think the restrictions on firearms was a Very Good Thing.
With that said, the culture in Australia is very different than in the US. Smaller population, less income disparity, more social policies and safety nets.
We don't seem to have the same tensions with race - we have our own problems and deplorable treatment of the indigenous people is one of them but they are different than in the US.
I've grown up in outer suburbs and had friends on properties or who grew up in the country.
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I agree with the AC that no amount of gun-control seems to be enough, and the fact that, for instance, Australia's gun laws are frequently held up as an example even though they would violate a whole raft of Constitutional rights if implemented in the US is certainly worrisome. But the problem is deeper and much more troublesome than that. Existing laws are not employed against known threats by objective criteria-- the Parkland gunman had over thirty encounters with law enforcement, several of which were ch
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To sum it all up, mental health services are expensive at it is cheaper to allow the crazies to kill other poor people and have the crazies publicly executed by law enforcers. Now if only the crazies would focus on the rich, then we would have mental health services implemented, rather than them killing the rich at random intervals ie instead of school shootings, hidey holes of the poseur rich shot up, that would see some real change taking place.
Recurrent headline... (Score:1)
I guess FBI and the newspapers will keep repeating this story until they get their backdoor.
Itâ(TM)s quite interesting however that it seems no other nation has huge problems to retrieve forensic data from iPhones...
Privacy vs lazy cops (Score:5, Insightful)
The FBI did not have the technical capability to access an iPhone used by one of the terrorists behind the San Bernardino shooting
So what? For most of the FBI's existence they didn't have access to any iPhones at all and yet somehow they still managed to be an effective police force. It is highly unlikely that any critical evidence was on the phone that could not be gathered by any other means or that the inability to unlock the phone would result in an acquittal. It's no different than if the phone was damaged or lost. The FBI can suck it up and do some old fashioned investigating. They have access to metadata, witnesses, video, testimony, and much more. If that isn't enough it's unlikely that the iPhones will make or break the case.
Strawman (Score:4, Insightful)
We must violate the Rights of peaceful, law abiding citizens and take away their guns because a small minority of the population misuses them to commit crimes, including murder.
Are you seriously comparing a purpose built weapon designed explicitly to kill living things with a multi purpose computer/phone? Spare me the false equivalency. Nobody is arguing for or against gun control here but it isn't at all the same issue or the same logic.
We can't have a judicially overseen process to break the encryption on the personal devices of small minority terrorist or other criminals because it would infringe on the Rights of peaceful, law abiding citizens.
When you can design an encryption system that isn't rendered useless by the presence of a back door then your strawman might be credible. Unfortunately the laws of mathematics are pretty inflexible and nobody has figured out a way to put in a back door that only trusted parties have access to. Even if we completely trusted the government (which we don't) it still would be a bad idea.
Did I get it right?
Not even a little bit.
Re:Strawman (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems to me the AC was illustrating how some people seem willing to weaken some Rights, but not others, based on their own self-interest.
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Seems to me the AC was illustrating how some people seem willing to weaken some Rights, but not others, based on their own self-interest.
That's not what the AC did or if that was the intent it was a very poor effort. Gun rights are their own thing with their own challenges. Setting up a false equivalency between gun rights and privacy rights is not helpful to either one.
Re:Strawman (Score:4, Interesting)
Just some food for thought. If you agree that any right explicitly protected in the US Constitution can be ignored and/or restricted then you are also agreeing that ANY right explicitly protected in the US Constitution can be ignored and/or restricted.
Your not supposed to cherry pick what parts of the Constitution you uphold and protect. You uphold and protect ALL of it, warts and all.
If people don't like part of it then they should support an amendment to alter/revoke that part, but until the amendment goes into effect they should follow the Constitution as it is. Like it or not.
Another thing that people forget is that the Constitution doesn't grant any rights, everyone already has "Freedom of speech" and the rest. The Constitution is meant to put limits on what the US government can do, nothing more.
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Hear Hear!
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Not arguing for or against the point at hand here, but that's basically what virtually any political argument boils down to. Whether it's guns, abortion, healthcare, tax reform, immigration reform, term limits, segregation/affirmative action, whatever, people are wanting to tweak the balance of rights. Whether it's hardcore left folks who want to ban guns (but not other rights), hardcore religious folks who want to ban speech they consider blasphemy or establish state religions, basically any political argu
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Did I get it right?
No. Because mathematically implementing any form of encryption bypass weakens the encryption.
I've explained this before, but let's try again.
The most accurate real-world analog to data encryption is a pin-and-tumbler lock. In its proper and fairly secure form, each pin consists of two parts and the proper key lifts each tumbler so that the break between each pair of pin pieces lines up with the tumbler and the whole mechanism can turn freely. If you implement a second valid key shape, that means each dif
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Wait..is anyone actually arguing against that?
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Pretty sure Thomas Jefferson did.
Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem
There actually wasn't a privacy issue in this case (Score:2)
Apple spun it as a privacy issue, as if the government were trying to get into your personal phone, and the press ate it up. That wasn't the case
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On top of that, the guy was dead, and legally thus far your human rights evaporate upon death.
That is patently not true, although I have been hearing rumblings of it recently.
When you die, your rights pass on to your next-of-kin, and it has always been this way. Otherwise, upon a person's death the government (or anyone else for that matter) could legally seize all property that was under said deceased person's name.
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So what? For most of the FBI's existence they didn't have access to any iPhones at all and yet somehow they still managed to be an effective police force.
False equivalency.
50 years ago if I wanted to talk to you about doing a crime I could phone you, write you a letter, or send you a telegram. The FBI could and did intercept all those communications to catch bad guys.
They were able to be an 'effective police force' due in large part to the lack of technological impediments.
Today, I could commun
agree with Apple but what if they do it for china (Score:2)
agree with Apple but what if they do it for china but not for the usa then how will you feel?
good (Score:1)
The day will come and is already here when it won't matter if you are law abiding or not.
And yet... (Score:5, Informative)
"According to the report, FBI executive assistant director Amy Hess "became concerned" that the department chief of the Cryptographic and Electronic Analysis Unit (CEAU), the division charged with obtaining evidence from electronic devices, did "not seem to want to find a technical solution" that would unlock the shooter's phone.
The report added that the chief said he may have have known of a solution, "but remained silent in order to pursue his own agenda of obtaining a favorable court ruling against Apple.
The report found that nobody withheld knowledge of an existing technical capability, as Hess had feared, but the watchdog found that the CEAU didn't pursue all possible avenues in the search for a solution. http://www.zdnet.com/article/f... [zdnet.com]
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I came here to say the same thing. The summary is terrible. The report basically says that the FBI knew they could get into the phone but didn't want to admit it, so they could pursue the court case and obtain the precedent they wanted.
FBI did not NEED to access locked iPhone.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe that the FBI is attempting to distract us from the critical, core issues of this debate. In arguing the technical details of accessing cell phones, they distract from the critical speech issues. They REALLY don't want us to ask:
The US government has managed to bypass the 1st, 4th and 5th amendments by creating and extending the 3rd party doctrine. This doctrine roughly states that once information passes out of an individual's direct control, he can no longer exercise any control over it. This gives the government easy access to huge amounts of shared information.
The "Responsible Encryption" debate is a new legal theory to destroy speech and freedom. It is a "No Party Doctrine". That is, No Party, except the government, is allowed to control information. The No Party Doctrine says that information is so important to the government, that nobody except the government should be allowed to control it. There is no information so sensitive, private or protected that it should escape government control. Since information is so important, individuals must not be allowed to control it through their speech, actions, tools, or situations.
The FBI is cheerfully stating that the creators of the constitution would have allowed complete government control if only they had realized that information was important to a criminal investigation.
We should denounce the "Responsible Encryption" proposals as a straightforward attack on our freedom of thought, speech and association.
Instead, we should act to limit the 3rd party doctrine and restore our rights of speech and association.
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The US government has managed to bypass the 1st, 4th and 5th amendments by creating and extending the 3rd party doctrine. This doctrine roughly states that once information passes out of an individual's direct control, he can no longer exercise any control over it. This gives the government easy access to huge amounts of shared information.
Provide additional data on this topic [johnmoserforcongress.com]. I must fix this.
What is this solving? (Score:3)
If the FBI cannot access the contents of dead terrorist's phones after they have committed their heinous acts then how can we expect them to properly close barn doors after the horses get out?
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Not to sound macabre, but didn't the FBI have both the fingers (as well as everything attached) and the iPhone in their custody well before the required password timeout kicked in? I recall Apple suggested the phone was still free to use the biometric unlock while the FBI was in possession of everything they needed to do this.
The phone was a iPhone 5C which doesn't have a fingerprint scanner. All models after the 5C and before the X have scanners. Apple did tell law enforcement how best to access the phone backups (and iCloud info); however, they ignored the advice and tried to force reset the password which locked out the phone.
So if I do recall correctly and if this is the case, then this watchdog's findings are not entirely true. Unless they mean the FBI doesn't have their shit together enough to access the terrorists phones.
No the findings are true if you read the actual report. The news reporting is not accurate. The words on the actual watchdog report is the FBI "did not have the capability to exploit" not "did not have a
The report doesn't say "access"; it says "exploit" (Score:2)
The article says that the FBI didn't have the ability to "access" but the actual report [documentcloud.org] says "exploit". The difference is that we know that the FBI had the ability to access the iCloud information that the phone shared but lost it when they disregarded Apple's advice on how to access that information. So the FBI had the ability to access some information on the phone. Also we know how to access the iPhone; guess the number combination. Given default settings with a forced delay, it would take 200+ days to u
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Yes. But that requires a warrant and will leave a paper trail should the FBI use an outside resource to go fishing. They are just throwing a temper-tantrum until they get everything they want.
Let's say there was a backdoor (Score:2)
Hack-resistant backdoors aren't practical (Score:1)
It's possible to build a hack-resistant backdoor into something like an iPhone, but it's just not economical unless the value of a key-escrow system is extremely high.
The key things that make it hack-resistant are:
* Difficulty and cost of decrypting a device is high
* Decrypting a device requires lots of human effort, lots of time, and physical access to many different things which are not in the same place.
* Decrypting one device does not get you any closer to decrypting similar devices
One solution - listed
Hard to fix incompetence (Score:2)
If the FBI would actually do their job, they would have had access to those phones via warrant BEFORE the whole thing went down.
It turns out, most of the crazy shit happening today is usually KNOWN to the FBI before the SHTF, they just never do anything or act upon this information.
If you get word that X is gonna shoot up a bus full of Nuns, you get a warrant going and you start watching the folks in question. Hell, even Apple will help you if you have a proper warrant.
But, going back to at least 9/11, th
They Should Have Access...BUT (Score:2)
I want law enforcement to have access. But only with a warrant. This should be treated no different that snail mail, as it's the private communications of individuals, but the system has managed to pervert that by claiming that there should be no expectation of privacy. THAT needs to be fixed.