Category: Privacy, Surveillance, & Security

Apple, Privacy, and iPhone Encryption

RE:
– Why Apple’s fight with the FBI could have reverberations in China – LA Times
– Why Apple Is Right to Challenge an Order to Help the F.B.I. – The New York Times

“This completely undermines privacy overseas and if the administration thinks this precedent wouldn’t be used by China, Russia and others then they are in serious error,”

“This particular request to [decrypt an iPhone] is remarkably reasonable, but the precedent it sets is disastrously bad,”

– Nicholas Weaver, a senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley

 

This legal case has *nothing* to do with actually accessing the information on the device. John McAfee (the founder of antivirus maker and global purveyor of computer security McAfee) offered to decrypt the phone for free. It has everything to do with punishing Apple for standing up for privacy and encryption.

More: “Secret Memo Details U.S.’s Broader Strategy to Crack Phones”, by Michael Riley and Jordan Robertson / Bloomberg News
– https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-19/secret-memo-details-u-s-s-broader-strategy-to-crack-phones
– http://www.telegram.com/article/20160219/NEWS/160219140

Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

Even if we trust the motives of our current governments, and every person with authorised access to our data, we are taking an incredible risk. The systems of surveillance that we entrench now may be misappropriated and misused at any time by future governments, foreign intelligence agencies, double agents, and opportunistic hackers.

Source: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

 

Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.

– Edward Snowden

The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists – The Atlantic

In the 1950s, a group of scientists spoke out against the dangers of nuclear weapons. Should cryptographers take on the surveillance state?

I don’t think you can have a healthy democracy without healthy journalism, and I don’t think you have healthy journalism without the ability to conduct a private conversation.

And that includes not just what you’re saying, but whom you’re saying it to. If every contact a journalist makes—and the weight of that contact: the number of minutes, the frequency, and such—is something that hundreds of thousands of analysts can get from a Google-like search tool, I think that this makes serious investigative journalism effectively impossible.

Source: The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists – The Atlantic