Dear Colleagues,
I go away on vacation, hoping to miss the main event...and what
happens? All the important parties go on vacation too...What
happened...? Even cryptome @freelists went quiet with the Sound of
Silence, with John Young the only contributor.
The latest before I left was that the USG was taking an extremely hard
line in its last submission on the court case. No holds barred, no
compromises, the USG wanted access no matter what the cost...in fact
they had quite a fetish about it...;-) . They will take it all the way
to the Supreme Court; the best legal and political arguments that the
executive, the administration, security services and law enforcement
could muster or dream up were put in their submission to the court. An
interesting read...if only because it is a pointer to any future court
cases in the area of security, privacy and end to end encryption between
the state and individuals. All that case law, all that thinking, all
that marshalling of resources to force Apple to provide a legitimate way
to enter and end their absolute end to end encryption.
So, why the vacation...and remember, that the USG can always raise the
issue again with Apple or any other company. As the renowned world
non-expert in such matters, apart from a Masters Degree in the Invention
of Silly Ideas, I but merely venture a few non sequiturs...Is it to do
with new developments in chromatography, or with the sensitivity of
oersted discovery, or new nanomaterials of storage mediums or finely
tuned nano-metric forensic software mapping the internal structures of
the Apple phone, as did IBM with its scanning tunnelling microscope and
the depositing of the letters IBM on a piece of "grey goo" which won its
inventor a Nobel Prize? Or could it be one of those highly sensitive MRI
machines which map the pulses and their positions of the human body and
brain as it thinks and works; allowing copies of the electronic gubbins,
neural networks emitting emps, chemical changes in response to electric
forces, to be made so that access security codes can be brute forced,
which has been adapted to inanimate objects like plastic Apples...or is
it the FBI and the NSA wisely getting together and many great meetings
of minds taking place to overcome the problem by other...surreptitious
means, which may or may not be legal...and which may...or may not be
viable, so leaving Apple and their fanbois fetishists with the
disadvantage that they will never know whether its end to end encryption
can be cracked or not, and whether their private information will
forever remain safe and secure. Modern science fiction is so behind
what is happening in the real world these days, in my view. In my day,
H.G. Wells and John Wyndham, Aldus Huxley and C. S. Lewis, George Orwell
and Gene Roddenberry and Alan Dean Foster, were at the forefront of how
the world was developing and where it was going...:-) . Nowadays, it
is mostly pap, Hollywood is finally running out of ideas and a vivid
imagination, the focus is moving elsewhere...in my view...:-P .
see url:
http://bestsciencefictionbooks.com/best-classic-science-fiction-books.php
It is as well to remember that eyes and ears and minds were focussed all
over the world on this case. An awful lot of discussion has been going
on, and a lot of stuff which was not in the public domain, or in the
public domain but not much publicised was coming to the fore. Even here
in the UK concerns have been expressed by many people on the depth of
mass intrusion and absolvement of the security services and law
enforcement for encroaching and even damaging the peoples "internet of
things", from driverless cars, to automated medical procedures, to
controlling central heating systems, to introducing malware legally into
all sorts of digital machines and toys in the name of protecting the
masses from the criminals and terrorists. Concerns have been expressed
by both enemies and friends of the US, and senses focused on the
strengths and weaknesses through the use of open source materials which
have been published as part of the court documents. The media has known
no bounds in its publishing of all sorts of scares, scams and wild
stories about computer security and those who market them. It has also
been very good though, at circulating stuff which is of high scientific,
education and cultural interest, so bringing it to the attention of a
wider audience.
The extent and depth of the surveillance for one thing has come to the
forefront of popular intelligence, the weaknesses and strengths of
public encryption systems, the continuing degradation of individual
rights of privacy at the expense of increasing the power of state
surveillance. The determination of the executive and law enforcement to
leave no stone unturned in getting access to cell phones, by hook or by
crook, by legal or illegal means has been further exposed and
highlighted, the necessity of catching crypto-aware, security aware
criminals and terrorists by surveillance, monitoring and cracking their
systems, at the expense of individual rights of protection of security,
privacy and confidentiality in conducting ordinary, every day legal
business, whether it be family on Facebook or with ones bank, or using
ones car or transport services. The catching out of the myths of those
in the security industry who market the mantra of absolutely end to end
encryption being uncrackable and available to the general public. The
public exposure of government organisations who have lost huge amounts
of private and secure data and information, the incompetence of some of
the highest officials, yet at the same time, those very officials who
have attacked those whom they believe are their enemies, not because of
concerns about the security of the peoples state, but because of their
personal state.
To Cellebrite...the FBI may or may have not found a viable solution via
an Israeli company which has copyright issues with some US companies
over its forensic software having at least 10 ways of getting into
various cell phones such as Blackberry (once the favourite of company
executives and high administrative officials) and earlier editions of
Apple iPhones, and Samsung phones by using back doors or bugs in booting
systems... The information which the FBI has gleaned from Farooks
phone, as yet, is unavailable as are the alleged methods or abilities to
do so.
The world, as Dickens and Oscar Wilde have both said, is just full of
useless information, even more so today with the plethora of I.T.
storage and communications systems. Yet out of all that crap that has
been published in the case between USG v Apple, a lot of valuable
lessons have been learned in my view, some short term, some in the
medium term and some in the longer term, and different groupings coming
to the ball have had much to take away, and much to gain, whilst those
of us who watch...well...that's all part of the learning process and
stuff which might appear to be quite useless today, could become quite
valuable tomorrow...;-) .
Perhaps if we looked more at strategies for peaceful co-existence and
done something about the causes of international and national terrorism
and how to prevent it, even if we just developed a dialogue with our
"enemies" as well as our friends, we might just get a more fruitful
outcome rather than keeping on the road our states are going down
now....but, there again...pigs might fly.
ATB
Dougie.
P.S. Has Mr. Trump been elected as the next President yet...