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> Should governments be able to access information at all or should they be blind, that's essentially what we are talking about
Actually it is not what we're talking about, because they're not blind, they can use usual means of inquiry, and the technology. How comes already there are no firearm firing sound detectors, or remote-controlled drones with tasers in major streets to react instantly, ect...? There are ways to act which don't strip citizens from their power, as information nowadays is power.
A handful of people died because they lacked this power, and this will always be the case that people will die because of their lack of power, no matter what they have.
At the end of the day, there is 7 billions people, and only one world, one humanity, one future, so protecting the people from the government is more important than protecting the people from the people, at least as long as it stays manageable.
Every month, the world gets more peaceful, and more educated, we just didn't always have the internet flashlight. Making such a backdoor, it's another leak to oligarchy, because security and corporations can ally and spy the rest into uncompetitiveness. Ect... I will worry when I see blood on the street.
"protecting the people from the government is more important than protecting the people from the people, at least as long as it stays manageable."
This is fundamental, and this point needs more airtime than it gets. Terrorism is a real threat. It is a challenge that our institutions are struggling to deal with. But the threat that it poses is tiny compared to the threat of powerful government, a troll that goes back to the beginning of civilisation. We must not let the focus on terrorism distract us into relinquishing defenses against the greater threat of powerful government.
Advances in technology make privacy more important than it has ever been. Without privacy, there is vast opportunity for government to reach deep into our lives in the name of enforcement.
Government of the people has an obligation to find ways to combat terrorism that are compatible with the controls we need on government. If we don't hold the line on privacy, government will increasingly shift us towards serfdom.
This point cannot really be overstated.
It is quite sad that we've reached a point where technology could empower us to lift up the state of humanity, but we're deploying it in a way to keep humanity in subservience of the state. Of course... there is no such thing as a government; it is just people oppressing other people[0]
Terrorism is broadly defined as using threats and violence to coerce a civilian population for political purposes... when the government grants itself the right to indefinitely detain dissidents and declares that its own territory is a battlefield (NDAA 2012) and authorizes itself to deploy propaganda domestically (NDAA 2013), and does things like threaten economic collapse and martial law if the citizens won't pay $1 trillion with no accountability (TARP bailouts)... who are the real terrorists under that definition?
How comes already there are no firearm firing sound detectors
There are: http://www.shotspotter.com/
Though results are mixed at best: https://www.cctvcambridge.org/DoesShotSpotterWork
> I will worry when I see blood on the street.
Playing devil's advocate to your last comment. There are a lot of people in the world that DO see blood on the street, every single day. Does the fact you come from a country that doesn't out weigh their experience? I agree with a lot of your other points, but if you want to be true to them then it shouldn't matter even if you see blood on your own street. Even if you become the minority that is to die. You're just one more human in humanity... we all are.
Further to that you need to be able to say the same thing when it is your family that may die, or your child.
<<Actually it is not what we're talking about, because they're not blind, they can use usual means of inquiry, and the technology. How comes already there are no firearm firing sound detectors, or remote-controlled drones with tasers in major streets to react instantly, ect...? There are ways to act which don't strip citizens from their power, as information nowadays is power.>>
That's actually exactly what we are talking about. The police's job is to enforce the law, and as technology changes, they need to adapt, the same way firearms now have serial numbers, and they collect DNA samples / fingerprints (all of which have met similar resistance before they became a broadly adopted technology, and are also open to abuse).
It's totally fine to have a rational discussion of where, as a society, we want to draw a line, but let's please keep our own rhetoric in check - there are lots of scenarios (outside the high visibility of this case) where, with proper legal controls, enabling the police to be able to access someone's phone is the equivalent of a traditional search order that allows the police to enter someone's premises and search for evidence.
Let's not play dumb. If we (me included) get our way and have perfect digital security, it WILL make it harder or impossible for law enforcement to do proper police work. Criminals will be able to do all business and communication with 100% privacy from spying.
Let's debate honestly about what we think is acceptable. I honestly don't know, but I think perfect security is a mathematical inevitability, so I guess I'm more on the side of figuring out how to live with it.
> "They are not asking for some general thing, they are asking for a particular case."
Was hoping Gates would be less naive in thinking this legal precedent has anything to do with this specific case which has close to 0% chance of providing any real-world information and more to do with the fact that this tragedy is used as political theatre and being exploited for maximum PR and political influence.
> "Should governments be able to access information at all or should they be blind, that's essentially what we are talking about"
That's one way to frame the debate, the other is "Do We Have a Right to Security?" https://securosis.com/blog/do-we-have-a-right-to-security
Given the US Govt is coming from a position of no trust who've shown a willingness to over reach and break the law whilst continuing to deceive and mislead the public - US citizens have every right to privacy that's insulated from the Government: http://blog.easydns.org/2016/02/22/the-us-government-has-no-...
Yes, this is very naive. They're actually asking for a forensic instrument - asserting that it is for a one-time use is absurd on the face of it. The most thorough deconstruction of this argument I've seen is here: http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=5645
His point is not about this particular case. He's saying that it has to do with a particular case, i.e. that the FBI is not asking that Apple install a backdoor on every iPhone.
<<Was hoping Gates would be less naive in thinking this legal precedent has anything to do with this specific case which has close to 0% chance of providing any real-world information and more to do with the fact that this tragedy is used as political theatre and being exploited for maximum PR and political influence.>>
Regardless of the merit of the case, I think it's pretty inappropriate that you are calling BillG naive. You really think that somehow you have more insight into the situation than BillG, who has access to pretty much any resource and source of information?
The frustrating thing about all of this is the blatant misuse of terminology by the media.
London resident. 7/7 killed 50 people and injured 700. Ten years have passed. The Troubles were worse.
'Terror' isn't a thing. It doesn't exist. 'Terrorism', does not exist. The real terrorists are the media companies and politicians that attempt to instill terror in the populace.
They try to craft this image of a world to be feared, with danger lying around every corner. Look around you. It's more dangerous for me to eat a Mars bar than it is for me to ride the London Underground, for fuck's sake.
Always reminds me of this:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/06/ame...
Americans Are as Likely to Be Killed by Their Own Furniture as by Terrorism
This is the thing right here. We should be expending more energy having a discussion on what constitutes real terrorism. It seems terrorism has become an excuse to bleed money from the general populace to fund initiatives to build police forces into local military units. It also seems that the media constantly spews the word "terrorism" for anything they believe they can monetize by drawing in viewers. To date, there have only been a small number of events that I can honestly say were terrorism, and besides 9/11, everything else has been at the low end of the scale.
(Fear for) 'Terrorism' is the Swiss knife of government/law enforcement. They can use it to justify/enforce ANY policy they would normally not be able to.
"Terrorism is an invention through which any two armed people can take over an entire industry, namely television, with the eager cooperation of its owners."
-Marshall McLuhan
Apropos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcy8uLjRHPM
"[D]ocumentary film maker Adam Curtis shown during Charlie Brooker's 2014 Wipe program"
This response really disappoints me. That seemed like he completely deflected the question and didn't answer. Im sure he measured his words carefully so that he wouldn't have to answer the inevitable, "will microsoft provide the same kinds of privacy protection as apple?"
Come on Bill G
>> Mr Gates said the case was similar to the requests regularly made to phone companies and banks for information.
No. This is a request to create something to gain access. If it were simply an information request I doubt Apple would complain much. AFAICT Apple got tired of secret requests to provide access to user information, so made things so they can not comply. To be clear, the authorities can still get a court order to gain access to your phone. They just need to compel the user to provide the access. That's hard in this case because the user is dead, but none of that is really whats at play here and I think Bill G should know better.
The debate has been ongoing since the Snowden leak, and even before that among people who were aware of the disclosures by William Binney, Thomas Drake, et al. Unfortunately, the general public has shown that they really don't care at all.
Tech and government people tend to have strong opinions one way or the other, but the "debate" has mostly failed since the broader public couldn't care less, except maybe defaults to "(do|don't) trust your President," depending on whether their chosen political tribe is currently in office.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/23/11098592/bill-gates-fbi-ap... - Bill Gates says he was 'disappointed' by reports he backs FBI in Apple fight
But he doesn't fully support Apple, either
Bill is no fool so he must be taking this side of the debate for tactical reasons - e.g. Microsofts huge contracts with the government, or perhaps something to do with his Foundation and keeping the govt sweet, or perhaps to do with Microsofts installation of back doors in the past. I suspect he has been leaned on to enter the debate. Not defending him, just trying to figure out whats going on here.
"Terror data"? Hail newspeak.
Can someone who really knows it, please explain one thing for me? I've heard different statements and don't know which one is correct.
Can Apple - in theory - unlock that phone?
Is it
a) Unless there's a defect in HSM module (Secure Enclave) that allows the key extraction (like SEM data forensics or whatever), Apple just can't unlock the phone, because it's outside of their control.
I mean, I can readily imagine a system where encryption key is completely unknown to the OS, OS doesn't have any access (or has a write-only access using public key encryption) to the user data while the phone is locked, and encryption is performed by a tamper-resistant hardware, that won't do anything without a correct secret (passphrase) and HSM will irreparably erase key material after 10 failures (which is the behavior hard-coded into silicon).
or
b) Apple technically can unlock the phone by doing an OS update with a specially crafted insecure OS, but doesn't wants to do so, because it would create a bad precedent. I.e. the HSM isn't absolute and can be forced to disclose the key (or accept brute-force attacks) by the OS.
To put it simply: in theory, can Apple defeat their own security - if they would really want to - or not?
Edit: s/TPM/HSM/g
I wonder if his talk is just because of competition they have with apple or not. In my opinion he could just look at the problem more realistically and saying the monitoring should be in control of some judicial system that is different than current (return true) by default.
Also it is laughable that some people were saying these monitorings are going to be limited to terror act law.
Remember Government vs. MS case, where MS ultimately got what many people called a "slap on the wrist" [1]
I have nothing but a conjectures here, however, I always believed MS made a deal with the Government to give them a backdoor in exchange for far lesser settlement [2]
So I'm not surprised for Gates position here. It's mainly to justify his and MS earlier decision to give into the government's requests.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...
[2] http://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-microsoft.en.html
What if the secret the spies don't want anyone to know is that they are incompetent and that mass surveillance doesn't make us safer ?
-- egregiously stolen from Adam Curtis's 'Bugger' http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-...
The real danger will be the actual coming threat. Instead of their much trumpeted 'manufactured' stooge plots, our incompetent spies seem to be unable to effectively stop real battle hardened death zealots - despite near total surveillance.
Jails are surveilled in a panopticon way but rife with drugs and crime - so mass surveillance is demonstrably ineffective there.
The other worry is the nagging doubt that the fears of government are their political opponents rather than enemies of the state - our fears are not aligned with theirs.
That our political and surveillance classes are interested in power not our safety is continually evidenced by the horrifying way they use they blood of their own citizens to try to justify more political power.
Q.V. the recent attempt to link the crypto debate with the Paris atrocities or the invasion of Iraq.
So much of this conflict is manufactured by seeming negligence, the conveniently blind eye.
For instance: locking up a young disaffected drug dealer with the number 2 recruiter for Al Quaeda at the time (in France). Locked in the same jail cell together, a few years later the young recruit, recruits others and shoots a cartoonist.
In Bitter lake, Adam Curtis posits that Daesh/ ISIS was the product of a super jail in Iraq and much of the ground support of the conflict is from the local who initally supported their liberators but lost due to endless Whitehall red tape about compensation for farmers. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p02gyz6b/adam-curtis-bi...
I could take his stance on this one a bit more seriously if he was making it available how much revenue of MS comes from federal government.
At least this article gets that his position is a bit more nuanced, everywhere else in American news I'm reading "Bill Gates backs FBI!!!"
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bill-gates-sides-with-feds-in-ip...
I wonder what he would have said if he were still at the helm in Microsoft.
This coming from the same guy who advocates for cashless third world economies and a one world government[1].
[1] http://www.infowars.com/bill-gates-calls-for-global-governme...
This is always framed as a conflict between the government and "the people" but it's every bit as much a conflict between the government and a handful of hundred-billion-dollar megacorporations. Some of these entities are going to benefit from having enormous quantities of data at their disposal, it's just a question of which ones.
Zuckerberg's sort of aloof reaction to Apple's plight is telling. If it were really about citizens' rights then he would be every bit as outraged as when the FBI orders Facebook to hand data over.
Bill Gates is an influential person and his opinion matters to many people. Some media outlets seem to claim he sided with the FBI. He denies this. It seems to me that he is trying to say that there is a way for Apple to decrypt the phone without providing a backdoor. What's interesting in my opinion is how these so-called independent media outlets are (deliberately?) misinterpreting his words to use the authority of Bill Gates to influence public opinion. I am not saying this is a move by the FBI, but ...
The real issue is that they are after more than one phone. The DOJ is after twelve others according to the WSJ and the NY DA has 175 phones he needs unlocked.
It is just the tip of the iceberg and it won't be long before someone pushes legislation through Congress mandating a back door or and end to encrypted devices being allowed on US cellular networks
Better yet, they are beginning to the story that the next terror attack will be on Cook's shoulders.
I propose to have a smart solution with encryption. For example you could give half of the access key to the local government (maybe 1/4 to courts and 1/4 to police force), other half to Apple. If both parties believe on the case, they unlock the phone. Maybe we can also include the international court.
Bill is the world's richest person. If he wants the government to backdoor us all in the name of terrorism I want the one to his wealth. It's not just the government access that's at stake but all the other people (i.e. criminals, other govs) who will use that access to take whatever they want.
Just as gates is trumping on about how it's an isolated special request for data from his competitor Apple the FBI just requested data unlocking from another 6 phones...
Here's a simple, troubling aspect. The U.S. Government and state governments (and, I'm sure, foreign governments) increasingly seek to purchase private data for mining, and to sell their data for revenue.
The former is used particularly to make an end-run around legal restrictions placed on their own data gathering. And to create a firewall against oversight, with the activities of concern taking place in private entities not subject to public oversight.
The latter is... well, many things, but it is particularly a political expedience; when you face opposition raising revenue directly, instead sell off some portion of the public good, as quietly as possible. (Remember, for example, state departments of motor vehicles (DMV) trying to launch plans to sell drivers' data, including photos, a few years back?)
And, with the "revolving door" and ongoing sweetheart relationships between private and public positions and power brokers, there is also a large incentive of private and personal profit now driving this, as well.
So. Government data collection is no longer really nor just government data collection. It is increasingly -- or, increasingly dominant and pervasive -- a collusion between extant powers for their own purposes.
I don't want to be locked out of insurance, a job, etc. because my "profile" doesn't score high enough, or I friended the "wrong" person on Facebook. Nor do I want this to happen to others.
In biology, advanced species exhibit increasing levels of autonomy from "the herd." Our species and culture needs to keep that in mind and the foster it; there is strength in diversity. And that is predicated on some autonomy and privacy. The ability and freedom to differentiate and to find new modes, new optimizations. And to find the simple happiness that fosters greater productivity, not to mention a better personal life.
As an analogy, no one feels particularly comfortable with someone "staring over their shoulder" constantly -- particularly with a critical or condescending attitude.
A happy life does not involve Big Brother guiding, constraining, and homogenizing your every step.
Here's another thought Bill.
Can a government order a corporation to make a new product using considerable resources for the governments use.
What if an African government didn't like you giving out mosquito nets and said: no - you go to your factory and make us 10,000 nets and give the nets to the government, so we can give give it to our politicans and then if they so desire they can give it to the people so the government looks like a hero. Here's a court order making it so.
Gates isn't calling for a debate, said that the FBI is right, Apple is wrong, and there's no way the FBI would use this as a backdoor for all phones.
Did anyone really need another reason not to use Windows?
"Debate" = just let the government have what it wants.
Bill Gates Says Apple Should Unlock the iPhone (techcrunch.com) 5 hours ago (92 comments) got down-voted (285.):
WOW now this explains why Windows is so easy exploit and fatal security flaws were built in so that Bill could help his county. Seriously, this is a terrible justification it is a shame that he actually feels this is an appropriate response. Too bad he is that out of touch now.
I'm just going to be a little cynic here:
Bill Gates is still too attached to MS, of course, he build it. If Apple did what the feds asked it, this would back-fire Apple consumers.
1. People would just no longer trust Apple, which translates into less devices bought.
2. This won't prevent terrorist or whatever their excuse is. If terrorist know Apple does this, they will just use other devices.
At end, only us, the normal consumer loose with this.
This would just help MS and other companies to gain more market by screwing up Apple. Until the feds come after these other companies that is...
Wow, Bill Gates has an enormous financial incentive to diss on Apple over privacy in order to deflect privacy concerns away from Windows 10.
I found it disturbing that the corporate media covers this story with mentioning Gate's conflict of interest. We had General Electric (GE) News Network (also known as MSNBC) on all morning, they covered this story a lot, and never mentioned the conflict of interest.