[Cryptography] Apple 3rd Party dilemma

Ray Dillinger bear at sonic.net
Sat Feb 20 11:57:05 EST 2016



> At 08:27 PM 2/19/2016, Watson Ladd wrote:
>> That's not true either.  All the 3rd party doctrine holds is that you do not have a 4th amendment interest in the possessions of another, including information you gave to them.  
>> Comparisons to rape are simply ridiculous.

The 3rd party doctrine has extra complications here; Remember that
we're talking about Farook's work phone which was provided by his
employer.  And that he worked for the county.  So there's an
argument to be made that if he placed any evidence of a crime on
that phone, then  he has *already* provided it to the government.

There's another argument to be made that the owner of the phone
(that is to say, the county) has consented to the search already
but is unable to provide the unlock code.  Because Apple's
developed channels for getting the unlock code reset for a
customer involve loss of data, the search that the *owner* of
the device wants carried out, cannot be done.

Anyway, it's a mess.  As far as I can see this is probably
the perfect case to use to create really bad law.

Remember how the law enforcement community was baying at the
moon about encryption after the Paris attacks, even though the
attackers had done their dirtywork in the clear on unencrypted
devices?  They hoped to get bad law passed because that crime
was heinous enough to make people fail to actually think,
even though *that* crime had nothing to do with the law they
wanted.

To this day the majority of the uninformed public who experienced
that misinformation campaign believe that the Paris attackers
were using encryption, in the same way that the majority of
people who watch only Fox News still believe Iraq had those
WMDs that the US was just plain lying about when it was bullying
its European allies into agreeing to its ill-advised war.

Well, it looks to me like this is the case that they wanted
the Paris attacks to be.  It's so precisely tailor-made for
the purpose of getting bad law passed that if I didn't know
better I'd guess that it had been carefully planned for the
purpose, or that opportunities to prevent it might not have
been seen as being as useful to the interests of law enforcement
as letting it happen, or that stopping it might not have been
as useful as making sure that the device was encrypted in case
Farook had forgotten to do it.

But that's crazy conspiracy theory, right?  That would be
exactly the opposite of what law enforcement is supposed to
do.  That's so nutty it's like the crazy conspiracy theories
some of us used to believe about the NSA undermining the
defenses of the same citizens it was supposed to protect.
It could never actually happen, right?  Right?

 . . . ... crickets chirping . . .

				Bear
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