Apple v FBI - Some Uncomfortable Truths

 

‘We must not lose sight of corporate power.’ Grand Central, an installation by Valentin Ruhry, cleverly subverts digital consumer culture with a product display featuring everyday objects found at a train station. MAK GALLERY, Vienna, 2014, curated by Marlies Wirth. Courtesy of Christine König Galerie, Vienna.


Julia Powles and Enrique Chaparro in The Guardian


It has been a spectacular six-week showdown – the world’s most valuable brand, Apple, pitted against the powerful American agents of the FBI. Two titans of spin, locked in a fast-moving battle over a dead terrorist’s smartphone. Now, as dramatically as it exploded, the FBI’s legal demand that Apple help it crack the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino killers has evaporated – the agents hacked their way in anyway, assisted by a mysterious third party.

There was always more to the Apple v FBI case than met the eye – and it is true for this latest twist too. The biggest issue is that both sides stand to gain a lot more from this battle than any of us. With little relation to reality, and backed by a worryingly partisan chorus, the notoriously closed Apple is emerging as a champion of users’ rights. Equally worryingly, a government agency is claiming the power to keep to itself a tool that can potentially break security features on millions of phones, while earmarking a demand for further judicial or legislative intervention in the future. Whichever way you look, this feud is far from a road to freedom in the digital environment.

Breaching Fortress Apple

From the FBI’s side, it seems clear that the case was opportunistically selected. No one wants to defend a terrorist. And after hammering on about law enforcement “going dark” on secured communications, the authorities were salivating for a pin-up case. Terror on home soil provided it.

But the FBI failed to account for one thing: the fallout of enraging a cultish brand on top of the most guarded, controlling ecosystem that computing has ever seen. Apple, incensed at the idea of anyone trespassing on its authority, went public – an equally opportunistic move, straight from the Taylor Swift playbook. And in so doing, Apple debunked the FBI’s otherwise earnest rhetoric that it only wanted to get at one iPhone, from one terrorist.

The key fact is that the FBI demanded a general tool: a modified operating system able to circumvent certain user-set security features in any given iPhone. There are clear dangers in bringing such a tool into existence. As forensics expert Jonathan Ździarski puts it, this is “a bomb on a leash”; a leash that can be undone, legally or otherwise. The FBI’s last-minute deferral of the court hearing in this case would, ideally, have been the enlightened recognition of this reality, as well as the multiple case-handling incompetencies and dubious legal foundations of the FBI’s request. Bizarrely, the withdrawal was on another ground: a third party had emerged with a hack. With the case now wholly dropped, we have a new danger: a classified bomb held by the FBI and unknown third-party hackers – but not by Apple, the one party capable of defusing it.

These facts are as much as the public debate has countenanced, resulting in predictable mud-slinging between techies and bureaucrats; big tech and big brother. What this misses is that this case has been a cause célèbre all along because it presents minimal threat to vested interests and power.

Apple v FBI was never the mother of all privacy battles. It is and always has been a security battle, between alleged national security and individual security, fought over a landscape of increasing insecurity.

It is this insecurity – existing, pervasive, worsening, global vulnerability of our infrastructure, communications and rights – that has been the greatest deception in this battle to date. Because despite how Apple has portrayed itself and been valorized by the media, phones are not impregnable, nor are our data and the platforms they reside on. Not by a long shot. The outside hack proves just that: if an external source that decided to cooperate with the FBI could break into the phone, and in shockingly short time, other less savory sources could do so too.

This case should be a tremendous opportunity for a global conversation about technology fragility. We need responsible leadership that recognizes that there is no such thing as perfect security, and that responds with restraint and redundancy, rather than a headlong tumble into connecting all the things.

Coupled to this must be a specific concession at the heart of the case and the unsatisfactory truce now reached. Digital locks and picks, by their very nature, are binary – they work for all or for none. In the current state of the art, it isimpossible to manufacture what the FBI wants: implanted vulnerabilities, or “backdoors”, that work exclusively for “good guys with a warrant”. Whatever the FBI is holding now, it suffers from this reality. But the problem is also bigger than that. As renowned computer security expert Matt Blaze describes the essence of the dilemma: “We can’t discuss how to make our systems secure with backdoors until we can figure out how to do it without backdoors.”

Boxing in the shadows of vast corporate power

This case, and others like it, are also an opportunity for a deep and reaching conversation about corporate power, and about the increasing intrusion of tech majors into democratic space. This is an angle that has been worryingly absent in most of the case’s commentary.

Regardless of the merits of its position, many of the arguments that have been marshaled at Apple’s feet in recent weeks set a dangerous, potentially pernicious trend. In particular, the argument that corporations are subjects entitled to human rights such as freedom of expression is deeply problematic, undermining reasonable regulation and presenting a destabilizing influence on democracy. The black box society is real, and this case and inevitable future iterations of the same battle have every indication of making it worse.

So we are at the crossroads. And out in the cold. Many decisive questions still remain open, and despite the reams of technical jargon written about this case, its core is not primarily technical, but political.

Under ideal circumstances, and privilege against self-incrimination aside, we should expect that any society would reasonably cooperate with law enforcement to investigate heinous crimes. But what is the most rational response to take when authorities such as the FBI, as well as lawmakers around the world,continue to overreach in their demands, seemingly unwilling to protect an already fragile technology ecosystem and our rights within it?

At the same time, the sheer scale of corporate power challenges the very foundations of democracy, while keeping us locked within walled gardens. Apple,Google, Facebook and the rest have received a tremendous windfall from this case, with nothing more than their words to induce our trust. But trust must be earned. It is predicated on transparency and it demands accountability, not marketing and press releases. Big tech will maintain privacy (or whatever theydefine as privacy) as far as it is convenient for their business. And when it is not, they will gladly forgo it. Apple is no more immune to this than any other business, and we should be as vigilant about its power as we are about any government.

Political, legal and technical solutions (in that order) for these problems may exist. Only honest, open, democratic discussion can find them.

FBI-Apple case: Investigators break into dead San Bernardino gunman's iPhone

BBC News

The FBI has managed to unlock the iPhone of the San Bernardino gunman without Apple's help, ending a court case, the US justice department says.

Apple had been resisting a court order issued last month requiring the firm to write new software to allow officials to access Syed Rizwan Farook's phone.

But officials on Monday said that it had been accessed independently and asked for the order to be withdrawn.

Farook and his wife killed 14 in San Bernardino, California, in December.

They were later shot dead by police.

The FBI said it needed access to the phone's data to determine if the attackers worked with others, were targeting others and were supported by others.

US officials said Farook's wife, Tashfeen Malik, had pledged allegiance to the so-called Islamic State on social media on the day of the shooting.

Last week, prosecutors said "an outside party" had demonstrated a possible way of unlocking the iPhone without the need to seek Apple's help.

A court hearing with Apple was postponed at the request of the justice department, while it investigated new ways of accessing the phone.

At the time, Apple said it did not know how to gain access, and said it hoped that the government would share with them any vulnerabilities of the iPhone that might come to light. 

On Monday a statement by Eileen Decker, the top federal prosecutor in California, said investigators had received the help of "a third party", but did not specify who that was.

Investigators had "a solemn commitment to the victims of the San Bernardino shooting", she said.

"It remains a priority for the government to ensure that law enforcement can obtain crucial digital information to protect national security and public safety, either with co-operation from relevant parties, or through the court system when co-operation fails," the statement added.

Responding to the move, Apple said: "From the beginning, we objected to the FBI's demand that Apple build a backdoor into the iPhone because we believed it was wrong and would set a dangerous precedent. As a result of the government's dismissal, neither of these occurred. This case should never have been brought."

The company said it would "continue to increase the security of our products as the threats and attacks on our data become more frequent and more sophisticated".

Analysis: Dave Lee, BBC North America technology reporter

The court case that had the US technology industry united against the FBI has for the time being gone away.

Now this debate moves into more uncertain territory. The US government has knowledge of a security vulnerability that in theory weakens Apple devices around the world.

To protect its reputation, Apple will rush to find and fix that flaw. Assuming it can do that, this row is back to square one.

Therefore Apple has called for the matter to remain part of the "national conversation", while the US department of justice says it will still try to use the courts to compel Apple and other phone makers to help with future investigations.

Row just beginning

An Israeli newspaper last week reported that data forensics experts at cybersecurity firm Cellebrite, which has its headquarters in Israel, are involved in the case.

Cellebrite told the BBC that it works with the FBI but would not say more.

Its website, however, states that one of its tools can extract and decode data from the iPhone 5C, the model in question, among other locked handsets.

The court order had led to a vigorous debate over privacy, with Apple receiving support from other tech giants including Google, Microsoft, and Facebook.

FBI director James Comey said it was the "hardest question" he had tackled in his job.

However, he said, law enforcement saved lives, rescued children and prevented terror attacks using search warrants that gave it access to information on mobile phones.

Obama is all about 'universal rights' - except for Muslims

It's time the president acknowledges that systematized discrimination against Muslims is real and thriving

• 
• • Uzma Kolsy
  • theguardian.com, Saturday 31 August 2013 12.30 BST

Jay Leno talks with President Barack Obama during a commercial break on 6 August 2013. Photograph: Paul Drinkwater/NBC/Getty Images

I was watching President Obama employ his devilish charisma, in routine fashion, on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in early August. The banter dissipated as the interview took a more serious turn to embassy closures, Edward Snowden and, finally, Russia. Obama condemned President Vladimir Putin for Russia's recent "homosexual propaganda" bill saying:

"When it comes to universal rights, when it comes to people's basic freedoms, whether you are discriminating on the basis of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation, you are violating the basic morality that should transcend every country."

I was left rattled by the president's statement. Obama, who made history last year whenhe expressed his support for same-sex marriage, was comfortably unabashed in impugning Russian leadership on the reprehensible policy, as he should have been. But as a Muslim American, neither the irony nor the hypocrisy of his statement, championing "universal rights", was lost on me.

As we've witnessed time and time again domestically, most recently with the Associated Press revelation that the NYPD designated Muslim houses of worship and community centers as terrorist organizations, the United States is no stranger to legalizing discrimination. In the elusive pursuit of true equality, President Obama has made considerable and long overdue progress in securing the rights of the LGBT community. But he in no way can tout the badge of "basic morality" until he acknowledges that many Americans are being confronted with institutionalized discrimination in every tier of the government hierarchy. Racism, Islamophobia and prejudice run amok in our society, but when discriminatory practice is etched into law, it harkens back to a sinister time in our nation's history.

Regrettably, branding mosques as terrorist enterprises doesn't exactly move the needle given the NYPD's history of targeted surveillance and monitoring of the region's Muslim community. Invidious policy and religious profiling are not confined to the NYPD either. This is just the latest in a mounting string of offenses by government agencies against Muslim Americans. The FBI maintains an intimidatingly lengthy catalog of 15,000 spies, three times as many as there were 25 years ago. In a post 9/11 climate many of them operate as informants in mosques throughout the nation. The mosque that I grew up attending in Irvine, California, was infiltrated by one such informant, who worked so hard to plant seeds of violence and terrorism in the minds of its congregants that members of the mosque immediately reported him.

"Geo-mapping", the FBI's purported tactical crime fighting tool, was exposed as a covert mapping program to track and monitor Muslim communities engaging in constitutionally protected activity, without any suspicion of crime. Leaked FBI training materials have also cemented what we already know – the agency religiously profiles Muslims,instructing its agents that "mainstream" Muslims are terrorist sympathizers and the Muslim practice of giving charity is a cover for funding "combat".

It doesn't end there. Seven states have passed anti-Shariah legislation, redundant and extraneous laws that explicitly prohibit the use of foreign law in American courts, as already established by our nation's constitution. The bills passed in these states, most recently North Carolina, alienate the Muslim community and unfairly paint them as adherents of an archaic, anti-Western system, playing up longstanding stereotypes and stoking fears. Open-ended guidelines for Homeland Security initiatives, like the Suspicious Activity Reporting program, give credence to the subjective biases of citizens and law enforcement alike, allowing for religious profiling when dubbing something as "suspicious". And that is apart from the FBI Watch List and the TSA's No-Fly List.

TSA memos have indicated that their passenger screening process includes "things passengers might do which also might be things a terrorist would do, eg, pray to Allah right before the flight that you might have 90 virgins in heaven". Needless to say, many of these counter-terrorism measures disproportionately target Muslims. We see this disparity even in federal prison, where Muslims make up only 6% of the general federal prison population, but comprise two thirds of the inmates in Communication Management Units (CMU), prison units furtively created to isolate certain prisoners.

And all the while, the president has remained unnervingly silent.

I shouldn't have to point to statistics that most informants actually acted as agent provocateurs in terrorism probes. I also shouldn't have to cite that there is a dearth of evidence to prove that these national security measures, like the SAR program, are effective in combatting terrorism. I shouldn't have to clarify that there is no specter of Shariah law looming on the horizon and that Muslims are not looking to prop up a crescent and star flag in state capitols. And I've come undone at the thought of having to explain, again, that the overwhelming majority of Muslims being spied on, monitored, tracked and, in the case of 16 year old US citizen Abdulrahman Awlaki, killed – by federal, state and local agencies- are innocent of any wrongdoing.

My father's Islamic name should not place him on a watch list. When I pray in the airport, I should expect law enforcement to protect my right to do so, not jot notes in a security memo. And I should be able to attend my mosque without fear of reprisal, from anti-Muslim bigots and FBI spies alike. Being Muslim does not make me a criminal. I shouldn't have to say it, but secret measures that profile Muslims and veiled discriminatory policies assume as much.

This is not a "new low for the NYPD"; it's a dangerous manifestation of a foregone conclusion: in the name of national security, the civil rights afforded to Muslim Americans are being deliberately curtailed. It's time that the president acknowledges that systematized discrimination against Muslims is real and thriving, and expands the reach of his advocacy for universal human rights to include Muslim Americans.

Dark moments of institutionalized racism, alienation and ostracism besmirch this nation's history. It is all too coincidental that we recently marked the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr's legendary "I have a dream" speech – the impetus that led the FBI to surreptitiously launch one of the biggest surveillance operations in history – spying on Dr King himself. The idea that the government was looking for dirt on Dr King to discredit and destroy him seems ludicrous and offensive today. Here's hoping the president sees the historical irony.

A Saudi, a pressure cooker and the FBI…

Ali Khan Mahmudabad
14 May 2013, 09:34 PM IST

 

 

What do you get when you put a Saudi student, the FBI and a ‘bullet coloured’ pressure cooker together? Kabsah! Talal al-Rouqi, an Arab student in Michigan had cooked his favourite rice and meat dish, Kabsah (also know as Mandi) and was walking over to share it with his other Arab friend when a neighbor spotted him strolling in public with a ‘bullet coloured’ pressure cooker. Naturally, worried about the swarthy looking young man’s intentions, especially given the Tsarnaev brother’s use of the pressure cooker as a bomb container, the conscious citizen decided to report the incident to the FBI. Armed agents surrounded the Al-Rouqi’s apartment, asked to enter the premises and then quizzed him on his sojourn of two days earlier. Al-Rouqi explained that he was merely cooking dinner and sharing it with a friend. I am sure if he had not been so nervous, as he admitted to the Saudi newspaper ‘Ukaz, he would have offered to cook a pot so that they could take it, though obviously the public parading of the pressure cooker would risk upsetting passers-by. When leaving al-Rouqi’s apartment the FBI officer present turned to him and said ‘you need to be more careful moving around with such things, Sir.’ Of course, calling him Sir makes it alright. Next they will be telling Arabs to be careful when appearing in public, just in case someone gets upset.

In another incident a Saudi man who was being held for irregularities to do with his passport was also quizzed and detained for bringing two pressure cookers from Saudi Arabia for his nephew. The nephew had complained the ones in America are cheap, break easily and generally don’t do a good job. He helpfully also added that in case he did want to create an improvised device he would not try and import an authentic Saudi pressure cooker rather than use the cheap western ones which are widely available. 

Obviously, the threat from an ‘Ay-Rab’ pressure cooker is much greater than one sold in the U.S. of A. Incidentally, the international transport of pressure cookers is becoming quite a serious issue. An Indian friend in Cambridge wanted to bring a pressure cooker from India to cook daal but was wisely advised against it by his friends. Having read the news of the Saudi student he seems very relieved. In an unexpected twist, the import of pressure cookers to America from abroad by visiting aliens, in the rest of the world also known as tourists, might actually be a very real need because in the aftermath of the Boston bombings, Williams-Sonoma, a home furnishing chain, temporarily pulled pressure cooker stocks from their shops.

Now that carrying everyday items is a sign of being a potential suspect, especially if one has too much melanin (even though the Tsarnaev brothers looked more Caucasian than anything else), I have some advice for brown people and in particular Muslims in America. Please be more careful about using your cycles in public because they have steel ball bearings. If you want to hang a painting on your wall please do not go out and buy nails but rather ask someone else to buy them for you. In general avoid hardware stores because Muslims only ever go there to shop for improvised explosive devices. Your trip to fix the barbecue might result in the whole area being shut down. Never ever carry a bag or rucksack in public unless it is made of completely transparent material. Please carry pocket watches or a sun-dial as the digital watches most people wear could be construed to be timers. Most importantly, only use plastic boxes to carry food to friend’s houses. And before I forget, a quick disclaimer: I typed all this on a samurai-sword coloured computer. I know, I know! I will get a white one soon.

While pressure cookers are causing such angst, in America it is still be possible for people to go out and buy pistols, guns, sniper rifles and even automatic weapons over the counter. The day the war on pressure cookers was being conducted in Michigan, an average of 8 children and 75 adults would have died because of gun related crimes. Zero American citizens died that day because of terrorism. We are told about the war on terror everyday but then where is the war on guns? The war on poverty? The war on diseases? The war on road accidents? The war on obeisity? The war on smoking? The answer probably lies in the fact that all these problems need care, investment and money to be spent on them but do not provide a way of making money.