Ondrej Holzman On Thursday, Apple sent an official response to the court order that it should to help jailbreak your own iPhone, to continue the investigation into the San Bernardino terrorist attack. The California-based company is asking the court to overturn the order because it says such an order has no basis in current law and is unconstitutional.
“This is not a case of one lone iPhone. Rather, this is a case of the Department of Justice and the FBI seeking to obtain through the courts a dangerous power that Congress and the American people have not approved," Apple writes at the beginning of the possibility of forcing companies like Apple to undermine the basic security interests of hundreds of millions of people.
The US government, under which the FBI falls, wants to force Apple to create a special version of its operating system through a court order, thanks to which investigators could break into a secure iPhone. Apple considers this to be the creation of a "backdoor", the creation of which would compromise the privacy of hundreds of millions of users.
The government argues that the special operating system would only be used on the single iPhone the FBI found on the gunned down terrorist who shot and killed 14 people in San Bernardino last December, but Apple says that's a naive notion.
Its director of user privacy, Erik Neuenschwander, wrote to the court that the idea of destroying this operating system after one use is "fundamentally flawed" because "the virtual world does not work like the physical world" and it is very easy to make copies in it.
“In short, the government wants to force Apple to create a limited and inadequately protected product. Once this procedure is established, it opens the door for criminals and foreign agents to gain access to millions of iPhones. And once it's created for our government, it's only a matter of time before foreign governments demand the same tool," writes Apple, who is said to have been not even informed by the government about the upcoming court order in advance, even though both sides had actively cooperated until then.
"The government says, 'just once' and 'just this phone.' But the government knows that these statements are not true, it has even requested similar orders several times, some of which are being resolved in other courts," Apple alludes to setting a dangerous precedent, which he continues to write about.
Apple doesn't like the law under which the iPhone is being jailbroken. The government relies on the so-called All Writs Act of 1789, which, however, Apple's lawyers are convinced does not authorize the government to do such a thing. In addition, according to them, the government's demands violate the First and Fifth Amendments of the US Constitution.
According to Apple, the debate about encryption should not be resolved by the courts, but by Congress, which is affected by this issue. The FBI is trying to circumvent it through the courts and is betting on the All Writs Act, although according to Apple, this matter should rather be dealt with under another law, namely the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), in which Congress denied the government the ability to dictate to companies like Apple similar steps.
Apple also detailed to the court what the procedure was in the event that it is indeed forced to create a special version of its operating system. In the letter, the iPhone manufacturer called it "GovtOS" (short for government) and according to his estimates, it could take up to a month.
To create the so-called GovtOS to break the security of the iPhone 5C used by the terrorist Sayd Farook, Apple would have to allocate several employees who would not deal with anything else for up to four weeks. Since the Californian company has never developed such software, it is difficult to estimate, but it would require six to ten engineers and employees and two to four weeks of time.
Once that was done—Apple would create an entirely new operating system that it would have to sign with a proprietary cryptographic key (which is a key part of the whole process)—the operating system would have to be deployed in a guarded, isolated facility where the FBI could use its software to find out the password without disrupting the operation of Apple. It would take a day to prepare such conditions, plus all the time the FBI would need to crack the password.
And this time, too, Apple added that it was not convinced that this GovtOS could be safely deleted. Once a weakened system was created, the process could be replicated.
Apple's official response, which you can read in full below (and it's worth it for the fact that it's not written in the usual legalese), could start a long legal battle, the outcome of which is not at all clear yet. The only thing that is certain now is that on March 1st, as Apple wanted, the case will actually go to Congress, which has summoned representatives of Apple and the FBI.
Motion to Vacate Brief and Supporting Declarations
I am glad that the local editors are addressing this case. It will affect all of us in the future and will have a major impact on the "security of information technology".
This does not only apply to Apple, but to all such companies and products that are used by billions of people every day.
Sorry, but it's mainly about marketing. In the past, Apple has already done what the FBI is now asking for in about 70 cases.
He didn't.