“Ten engineers and a month of work — that’s what it could take for Apple Inc. to write the program the FBI says it needs to crack the San Bernardino terrorist’s iPhone,” Dina Bass and Joshua Brustein report for Bloomberg. “In a court filing responding to a government request that it help break into the device, Apple said the order that it provide ‘reasonable technical assistance’ doesn’t take into full account what that assistance would entail — and that it won’t be fast or easy.”
“One part of its argument that the order be dismissed depends on convincing the court that, as a third party to the investigation, it shouldn’t be required to expend time and resources that would create something that undercuts its own products,” Bass and Brustein report. “‘The compromised operating system that the government demands would require significant resources and effort to develop,’ Apple wrote in a brief filed with the court Thursday. ‘The order violates both requirements by conscripting Apple to develop software that does not exist and that Apple has a compelling interest in not creating.'”
“There’s no easy way for Apple to remove the limits on repeatedly guessing passwords, said Erik Neuenschwander, Apple’s manager of user privacy,” Bass and Brustein report. “Because the FBI doesn’t want to modify the operating system on the phone itself, the new version of iOS — which he dubs GovtOS — would have to run on the device’s random access memory, which would require it to be much smaller and simpler than Apple’s existing phone software. ‘Apple’s ecosystem is incredibly complicated,’ Neuenschwander argued in a declaration included in the filing. ‘Changing one feature of an operating system often has ancillary or unanticipated consequences.’ In the worst case scenario, GovtOS could inadvertently erase the data the FBI is after, Apple said.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Oh, no, 200 photos of school cafeteria trays could be lost!
Apple’s filing also states: “And if the new operating system has to be destroyed and recreated each time a new order is issued, the burden on Apple will multiply.”
As we wrote on Monday:
The day the U.S. government can force anybody to write something is the day the United States of America as we know it dies.
If this keeps up, you won’t need to build a wall. Nobody will want in.
Of course, Apple has in its power to render even these methods, should they be forced upon the company, moot with future iOS updates that protect user privacy from government overreach.
It would be nice, however, not to have to depend on a company to enforce U.S. Constitutional rights, but rather to have a government – made up of people who swear oaths to the Constitution, no less – that protects citizens’ Constitutional rights jealously instead of wiping their asses with the document daily.
SEE ALSO:
U.S. government sought data from 15 Apple devices in last four months – February 25, 2016
Here are the 12 other cases where the U.S. government has demanded Apple help it hack into iPhones – February 23, 2016
U.S. government seeks to force Apple to extract data from a dozen more iPhones – February 23, 2016
Apple CEO Cook: They’d have to cart us out in a box before we’d create a backdoor – February 22, 2016
Tim Cook’s memo to Apple employees: ‘This case is about more than a single phone’ – February 22, 2016
Obama administration: We’re only demanding Apple hack just one iPhone – February 17, 2016