Terrorism: Unlock the iphone when it is terrorism

all the encryption in the world doesn't stop traitors.

identifying traitors

Answer, if you can get out of the box, what are the tools National Security needs to stop those whose very intent is destroy a system that permits the freedoms you talk about?

The feds already have the call records, the texts, the emails, heck, they even have the shooters. For that matter, they probably have recordings of the calls. The FBI doesn't exactly have a sterling record of not abusing the public's trust so I'm not particularly inclined to extend more just because their PR folk have switched from "it's for the children" to "the terrorists are coming".

SAN FRANCISCO — An elite group of security technologists has concluded that the American and British governments cannot demand special access to encrypted communications without putting the world’s most confidential data and critical infrastructure in danger.

A new paper from the group, made up of 14 of the world’s pre-eminent cryptographers and computer scientists, is a formidable salvo in a skirmish between intelligence and law enforcement leaders, and technologists and privacy advocates…

In the paper, the authors emphasized that the stakes involved in encryption are much higher now than in their 1997 analysis. In the 1990s, the Internet era was just beginning — the 1997 report is littered with references to “electronic mail” and “facsimile communications,” which are now quaint communications methods. Today, the government’s plans could affect the technology used to lock data from financial and medical institutions, and poke a hole in mobile devices and countless other critical systems that are moving rapidly online, including pipelines, nuclear facilities and the power grid.

“The problems now are much worse than they were in 1997,” said Peter G. Neumann, a co-author of both the 1997 report and the new paper, who is a computer security pioneer at SRI International, the Silicon Valley research laboratory. “There are more vulnerabilities than ever, more ways to exploit them than ever, and now the government wants to dumb everything down further.”

Abstract

Twenty years ago, law enforcement organizations lobbied to require data and
communication services to engineer their products to guarantee law enforcement
access to all data. After lengthy debate and vigorous predictions of enforcement
channels “going dark,” these attempts to regulate the emerging Internet were abandoned.

In the intervening years, innovation on the Internet flourished, and law
enforcement agencies found new and more effective means of accessing vastly larger
quantities of data. Today we are again hearing calls for regulation to mandate the
provision of exceptional access mechanisms. In this report, a group of computer
scientists and security experts, many of whom participated in a 1997 study of these
same topics, has convened to explore the likely effects of imposing extraordinary
access mandates.

We have found that the damage that could be caused by law enforcement exceptional
access requirements would be even greater today than it would have been 20
years ago. In the wake of the growing economic and social cost of the fundamental
insecurity of today’s Internet environment, any proposals that alter the security dynamics
online should be approached with caution. Exceptional access would force
Internet system developers to reverse “forward secrecy” design practices that seek to
minimize the impact on user privacy when systems are breached. The complexity of
today’s Internet environment, with millions of apps and globally connected services,
means that new law enforcement requirements are likely to introduce unanticipated,
hard to detect security flaws. Beyond these and other technical vulnerabilities, the
prospect of globally deployed exceptional access systems raises difficult problems
about how such an environment would be governed and how to ensure that such
systems would respect human rights and the rule of law.

Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.

If what Apple knows can open the phone, then a traitor could also sell the method of de-encryption

We have even put that data out of our own reach, because we believe the contents of your iPhone are none of our business.