Alice, as much I'd love to agree with you about the privacy protection, you clearly miss one important point. FBI can still invest into creating a back-door themselves. Your absolute belief in security as something unbreakable is purely theoretical unfortunately. Every software has bugs. I'm telling this to you as a 10-year professional tester with a degree in IT from one of the best Maths/IT unis in the world (LOL, I didn't study with excellence and I'm probably not the world's best tester of course, but still, I do have some experience and knowledge). And among all bugs, there are security bugs too. The recent news about a bug in the C library affecting practically all server software is a good example. So if FBI spend enough resources, hire some ex-Apple devs, some hackers, create regular hacking contests, etc, they'll manage to break it, sooner or later. It's really only the question of time and money. This is precisely the reason why giving away information about yourself in the net, to Apple/Google/Facebook/wherever makes it prompt to hacking and getting stolen no matter the security concerns. So the only real way to secure your privacy is not to give the info. It may look to you extremely conservative and outdated, but that is essentially the sad truth.
And in this case, Apple quite literally use PR, trying to get them the image of not being Evil. Which is not that bad, of course. But really, it's a lot more about politics, business success, than it is about privacy that they care about.
Personally I'd probably still prefer that FBI invested themselves to design the back-door they needed without Apple's help though. So I guess it's their way of getting some budget pie from the government. But even if they manage to get that back-door done themselves, it can still leak to public. Because, well, it's still people who work in FBI. So eventually, it'll be more money people's taxes spent this way, and time lost for the court. This can of course also improve security overall, if they publish results about the found issues similar to how Google have done it so far. So it's still probably a better alternative, but clearly a more expensive one. And with a risk of them never publishing such reports. And I'm actually quite certain they might have it broken already, but simply need an official decision to use this info in court as a legal proof. Which is of course also a risk of misinformation being created unless verified by Apple, who wouldn't be able to do it without their own back-door. Or they'd have to approve the back-door created by FBI and then release a fix to it. Which is kinda similar to Apple developing the backdoor themselves. And we're back to square one LOL.
Let's see how this evolves.
last edited at Feb 18, 2016 7:19PM
