* BBC is reporting that an Israeli firm was the key player in the unlocking.
* Anybody ever notice that Israel’s economy seems to have a comparative advantage at snooping on other country’s phone calls?
* The fact that we supply Israel with all of our raw data collected on Americans seems to be slowly disappearing from search results. The rest of what Snowden laid out is still acceptable for discussion but not that little tidbit.
* It is only because of anti-Semitism in Europe. For thousands of years, the ancestors of the Israelis traditionally were not allowed to own land or join the military so their only way to make a living was, sadly, electronic eavesdropping.
* Despite the alt-right holding onto it like it’s forbidden knowledge, it’s no open secret the kind expertise Israel has, where it came from, and how they continue to maintain their ability.
* This “War on Terror” has become a bad joke. They won’t profile Muslims or bug Mosques, but they want the keys to crack all the iPhones? Its pretty obvious at this point that this War is a complete fraud, and they’re using terrorism as an excuse to violate our privacy. They haven’t caught anyone before they hit. Not one. They’re not spying on Al Queda, they’re spying on you!
* When a federal judge, against two millennia of Roman, canon, and common law, and against nature itself, ruled that the state must marry two men or two women, Tim Cook was all in favor of it.
But when a federal magistrate ordered Apple to comply with a lawfully issued search warrant, he clutched his pearls and felt the very Republic imperiled.
* Drudge reports that Hamas has hacked Israeli drones for years and used the eye in the sky for among other things, targeting of rockets. So Israeli technical prowess is a bit over-done and over-hyped. What does make Israel different is that they do a good job of commercializing the ideas that smart tech people attacking the enemy come up with in conjunction with the military and tech industry. As various writers covering American intelligence noted, that simply does not happen very much in the US intelligence community, where such efforts are more one-off types rather than rapidly commercialized. Of course the US is a much bigger country than edge-of-the-seat Israel, which has a thin margin of survival.
I tend to think that the FBI is *VERY* interested in the contents of the cell phone, particularly text messages and instagram images and what have you. Why?
TATP.
ISIS has been very successful in the European bombing attacks, and that involved TATP, made from acetone and hydrogen pyroxide. It is not nitrogen based so it is hard to detect, and does tend to explode in “work accidents” hence its jihadi name of “Mother of Satan.” None of the Belgium/Paris bombers had the know-how to cook it up with blowing themselves up. TATP is essentially a crystallized gas — it “explodes” by instantly converting to gas form i.e. 500% of former volume, hence the pressure wave. It is assumed that ISIS had an expert who helped both sets of jihadis cook up and deliver their TATP, without blowing themselves up in cooking it up or in transit.
My guess is that the FBI strongly suspects that the SB people had someone who helped them cook up TATP, for some reason did not deliver it — hence the unexplained two hour disappearance where apparently the couple drove around vainly seeking IMHO a meet-up with the bomb expert. This is someone the FBI **strongly** wants to find hence the court case. Most likely some White Hat hacker found a vulnerability and assisted the FBI for various reasons.
Note that Apple is a major backer of both Obama and Hillary! and you’d expect the Big Foot of Attorney General Lynch to come crashing down on anything impacting the beloved Apple; that this did not happen suggests a real strong possibility that the FBI for once was semi-straight up; after a key ISIS bomb supplier and no one wanted to get the blame if some other attack led to a horrific bomb aftermath. CYA being strong in DC.
And indeed I’d suggest that the key to the whole thing is Lynch NOT deep sixing the FBI request which since Apple is so tied into Obama-land and Hillary-land is weird in and of itself.
* Every phone/computer is vulnerable to hacking. There is no other phone or device that is invulnerable. If you don’t want to be vulnerable, then go live in a shack off the grid like Bernie Sanders circa 1964 (or like the Unabomber) . It is an endless race between the software developers and hackers – hackers find a hole, the developers patch it, the hackers find another hole, etc.
Most other software houses are willing to pay hackers for finding flaws but Apple (for reasons of arrogance or whatever) refuses to do so, so instead a private market for security flaws has developed – if Apple won’t pay, then government security services and criminals will. Apparently a “zero day” exploit (one that no one else knows about so that you can penetrate even a device running the latest patched version of the software) such as the one just used by the FBI can be worth millions on the market. Apple is unique in that they refuse to pay hackers but otherwise their stuff is no worse than anyone else’s and probably better than most.
The only interesting question is whether Apple will be able to figure out what the FBI/Israeli exploit was so they can patch it. If the FBI was not so stupid (the NSA isn’t) they would have hacked into the phone without ever alerting Apple so they could have kept using the exploit. I’m sure the FBI is in no mood to share the exploit with Apple but there are probably enough clues now that Apple will be able to figure out what it was and fix it in the next update. If it is a hardware vulnerability, they can fix it in the next version of the iPhone.
