[Cryptography] what about the metadata from Farook's phone(s)?

Mark Seiden mis at seiden.com
Sat Feb 20 18:53:15 EST 2016


If the government wants so badly to know whether Farook used his work
iphone to communicate with anyone, why don't they just look at the
Verizon phone bill for then?

Every text message and call will appear in the detail billing data.
Verizon doubtless has available tower data which can say where the phone
was during that period, and every attempted (incomplete) call, and the
data usage for that period.

Of course, they would "only" have metadata. They wouldn't know the
content of the calls nor the content of any text messages.  Until they
went to the recipient to ask nicely.

(If I were a betting man, I'm betting they already know that
a. he made no calls on that phone and
b. sent no texts from that phone on that day.

I am surprised that Apple has seemingly not pointed out that the
government could easily establish their bona fides for the need to
unlock the phone based on the metadata already known to them, which
is unstated in the application for the court order.

They doubtless already have the same metadata for the supposedly
crushed-beyond-recovery personal phones.

(Perhaps Apple can legitimately counter that the govt's insistence on
Apple doing work to unlock the phone is substantially a marketing
gimmick on the FBI's part, or perhaps they are too short of money
in their engineering budget to hire Chipworks, the Chinese,
the Israelis, or Karsten Noll.)

Also:

I am impressed that they are unable to recover *anything* from those
crushed phones, when in 2003, Kroll Ontrack managed to recover
99% of the information on a charred hard drive from the crash site
of the Space Shuttle Columbia.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2535754/data-center/shuttle-columbia-s-hard-drive-data-recovered-from-crash-site.html


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