“The FBI may be allowed to withhold information about how it broke into an iPhone belonging to a gunman in the December San Bernardino shootings, despite a U.S. government policy of disclosing technology security flaws discovered by federal agencies,” Dustin Volz reports for Reuters.
“Under the U.S. vulnerabilities equities process, the government is supposed to err in favor of disclosing security issues so companies can devise fixes to protect data,” Volz reports. “The policy has exceptions for law enforcement, and there are no hard rules about when and how it must be applied.”
“The referee is likely to be a White House group formed during the Obama administration to review computer security flaws discovered by federal agencies and decide whether they should be disclosed,” Volz reports. “If a review is conducted, many security researchers expect that the White House group will not require the FBI to disclose the vulnerability it exploited. Some experts said the FBI might be able to avoid a review entirely if, for instance, it got past the phone’s encryption using a contractor’s proprietary technology.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The FBI, in an effort to never let a serious crisis go to waste, despicably used dead terrorism victims to try to force the courts and public opinion to grant them a skeleton key into iOS.
The FBI either lied that they were unaware of other ways to get into that specific iPhone (Cellebrite is well-known; even Apple uses their services) than by trying to unconstitutionally force Apple engineers to write whatever the government dictates or the FBI is staffed by utter incompetents or both.
Apple could cement their win for liberty by simply buying Cellebrite, testing the method, stating publicly that all newer iPhones which contain the Secure Enclave have always been immune to hacking via the method the FBI paid Cellebrite to employ (NAND-mirroring) on the terrorist’s San Bernadino County-issued iPhone 5C.
SEE ALSO:
Apple’s new challenge: Learning how the U.S. cracked terrorist’s iPhone – March 29, 2016
Did the FBI just unleash a hacker army on Apple? – March 29, 2016
Apple declares victory in battle with FBI, but the war continues – March 29, 2016
Apple vows to increase security as FBI claims to break into terrorist’s iPhone – March 29, 2016
U.S. government drops Apple case after claiming hack of terrorist’s iPhone – March 29, 2016
Meet Cellebrite, the Israeli company reportedly cracking iPhones for the FBI – March 24, 2016