[Cryptography] the consequences of changing the password on your AppleID

[Henry Baker]

At 04:07 PM 2/20/2016, Mark Seiden wrote:
>so now we discover that if you have an unchanged password on your AppleID and you log on from a known network (known to the phone) the phone will then automatically back up to the Apple Cloud and that backup will contain the current content of the phone.
>
>But some clod at San Bernadino County changed the password for Farook's AppleID (somehow without knowing the old password) 12 hours after the phone was recovered by the government.
>
>So why doesn't Apple just go to its backups and restore the hash of the old password and the timestamp of the last password reset?
>
>and then the government can force a backup which Apple can provide?
>
>Problem solved, End of World Averted, Peace and Harmony in the iphone world again (except now we all know Apple is still a trusted party in this entire ecosystem).

I think you know the answer to this question: DoJ/FBI doesn't really care about the contents of this particular iPhone, but they want to use "terrorism" to score political points and to scare lawmakers into whupping some sense into that pinko Tim Cook.

DoJ would love to gibbet Tim Cook as a warning to the rest of Silly Valley.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbeting

DoJ has also been itching to gun the engines of the All Writs Act, and they figure Apple is the one to pay for the legal research on this one.

If the All Writs Act gets shot down, they have a large number of other laws of dubious Constitutionality to try out; they hope to get even more laws of dubious Constitutionality enacted as a result of this exercise.