Snowden: FBI Claim that only Apple can Unlock Terrorist’s Phone is “BULLSH**”

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It was all a ruse; a misdirection; solid bovine excretion; less colorful ways of expressing what Edward Snowden had to say about the FBI’s claim that only Apple could bypass the security on the San Bernardino Shooter, Syed Rizwan Farrook’s iPhone.

The FBI had previously persuaded a federal judge to issue a ruling which would force Apple to write code that would create a backdoor through its own security. Apple is, for now at least, apparently standing its ground against the ruling.

“The FBI says Apple has the ‘exclusive technical means’. Respectfully, that’s bullshit,” Snowden said via internet video conference during the Common Cause discussion, called the Blueprint For A Great Democracy.

The full video of the conference, titled “A Conversation on Surveillance, Democracy, and Civil Society”:

 

In the above tweet, Snowden also pointed to an article by the American Civil Liberties Union, which detailed how the FBI could have circumvented the iPhone’s security features without forcing Apple to do it for them. The article explains that “all the FBI needs to do to avoid any irreversible auto erase is simply to copy that flash memory (which includes the Effaceable Storage) before it tries 10 passcode attempts. It can then re-try indefinitely, because it can restore the NAND flash memory from its backup copy.

Indeed, it is surprising that the FBI (and especially its deafeningly silent tech-savvy buddy the NSA) was facing so much difficulty; security researchers have proposed several viable solutions such as “de-capping” the memory chip so that it can be accessed outside of the iPhone. Or resetting the iPhone’s internal password attempt counter, so that its counter would automatically be reset to 1, thus investigators would not be limited to a fixed number of attempts to guess the password.

“De-capping” however is risky – requiring great care to avoid damaging the chip. Both methods are expensive and time-consuming. Nonetheless, these techniques have been applied successfully before.

Apple has been the target of the NSA for at least 10 years now. Snowden himself had revealed that the NSA had/has the ability to remotely take full control of a person’s iPhone via a Smurf-themed suite of tools. Even the current state of an iPhone’s security is questionable, given the fact that the NSA whistle-blower himself, doesn’t use an iPhone for this very reason.

That the NSA has not had much to say on the matter, seems to indicate that the FBI might be purposely excluding it. It might be looking to gauge how much it could get away with in the name of terrorism, or it could be looking to conceal the full extent of the NSA’s current abilities.

(On a mostly-unrelated side-note, it is interesting to see Donald Trump take the government’s side on the issue in February by calling for a boycott of Apple products, while, according to Apple Insider Apple CEO Tim Cook- who was most vocal about this mess- met up in a top-secret retreat with government elite to discuss Trump.)

Sources: The Intercept, International Business Times, BGR, Tech Radar


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5 COMMENTS

  1. At this point of the negotiations, one would expect that FBI proposes to ‘open’ it in court in front of EVERYBODY, independent media included…
    But this will never happen, will it?
    How is FBI gonna get to it?
    For wanting it so bad is because they know already what there is in it!
    Therefore, it is better that the phone stays in possession of Apple, for safe keeping, above all. You never know……it might become really useful information, one day…

  2. And then you remember that we’re all watching the equivalent to WWE wrestling…

    San Bernardino Shooter, Syed Rizwan Farrook was part of a government PsyOp. All the evidence is right there in plain sight, but you’ll only find it if you look for it.

    Trump is an actor from that show “the Apprentice”, remember?

    Unkie Bernie is a Zionist puppet who already has a history of siding with Israel on their American funded pro-genocide campaign in the middle east. He wants to end government corruption with… total government control (ie Socialism). He’s totally against “big corporations” too… that’s what they tell me on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and Clear Channel radio at least…

    If Snowden were really against the establishment, the msm simply wouldn’t mention his name. It would be blacked out and they would pretend he didn’t exist.

    What you are basically seeing is a commercial for Apple. “Go out and buy the new iPhone… includes FREE false sense of security with ever purchase!”

    Those who are smart enough to know better… remember the facts; that we are being manipulated.

    Those who are not smart enough to know better, return to your regularly scheduled media propaganda and double-think. Forget everything I said and throw something at the image of Emmanuel Goldstein (Donald Trump) on your Telescreen.

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