The FBI has been unable to access a Washington Post reporter’s seized iPhone because it was in Lockdown Mode, a sometimes overlooked feature that makes iPhones broadly more secure, according to recently filed court records.
The court record shows what devices and data the FBI was able to ultimately access, and which devices it could not, after raiding the home of the reporter, Hannah Natanson, in January as part of an investigation into leaks of classified information. It also provides rare insight into the apparent effectiveness of Lockdown Mode, or at least how effective it might be before the FBI may try other techniques to access the device.
“Because the iPhone was in Lockdown mode, CART could not extract that device,” the court record reads, referring to the FBI’s Computer Analysis Response Team, a unit focused on performing forensic analyses of seized devices. The document is written by the government, and is opposing the return of Natanson’s devices.
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This is just an advertisement. There is no phone the government cannot get into if they wanted.
Is this an advertisement? Sure, yes. The government can get into any phone? No.
Any iPhone? Almost certainly.
Virtually any phone I would say, yeah. Either by rubberhose cryptanalysis or by sheer time, money, and tools, they most likely can.
So “any phone” turned into “virtually any phone”, and the owner needs to be alive and apprehended, and then they “most likely” can, maybe.
See, I mostly agree with what you said. But you can see how we have moved the goalpost away from “there is no phone the government cannot get into”, to “the government can get into most phones”, which is quite a different statement.
I am not moving goalposts or making different statements, I’m not the user you were replying to.
I also mostly agree with you, but my angle is that the difference between “the government can get into virtually any phone” and “the government can get into most phones” is that the latter makes it seem like you can be “smart/knowledgeable enough” to avoid that, and that’s untrue. You should assume everything you keep on your phone can be extracted because of the nature of smartphone manufacturers, the supply chain etc, but I do not believe no phone can’t be broken into like OP was saying, thus “virtually any phone” seems fitting.
I get what you are saying but I’m seeing this from a different perspective.
The first statement is saying “there is nothing you can do”. You shouldn’t care about your privacy, you shouldn’t try to be careful, you shouldn’t fight for yourself. The government is all powerful and you should accept your fate. That’s why I don’t like these sweeping absolute statements. They promote giving up.
The other is “this is hard, but it’s possible to win”. And sure, you probably won’t win if the government is specifically targeting you and sending agents with rubber hoses against you. But in all likelihood they aren’t. And there are many things you can do to prevent actual passive surveillance affecting you.
I am not saying privacy is a lost cause, I fully agree with you on your approach. But there’s a big difference between minimizing your footprint to avoid passive surveillance, and the FBI having your phone
Big claims require big proof. But I bet all you have is a hunch.
The big claim is that they couldn’t get into the reporter’s iPhone. You are right to demand proof before believing something so obviously made up.
Unless there’s an incredible amount of people “not in” on some universal secret, maths gonna maths, and physics gonna physics. Actual encryption works well in a proven way, computational power isn’t as infinite as some people think, and decent software implementations exists.
Getting hold of anything properly encrypted with no access to the key still requires an incredible amount of computing power to brute force. Weak/bad implementations can leave enough info back to speed this up, malicious software can make use of an extra, undocumented encryption key, etc. but a decent implementation would not be easy to break in.
Now, this does not say anything about what Apple actually do. They claim to have proper encryption, but with anything closed source, you only have your belief to back you up. But it’s not an extraordinary claim to say that this can be done competently. And Apple would have a good incentive in doing so: good PR, and no real downside for them since people happily unlock their phone to keep their software running and doing whatever it wants locally.
Or, they walk in through the back door.
Math have little room for backdoors.
I work alongside law enforcement. Part of my job involves helping detectives follow the instructions Apple/Google provide to them for downloading and unencrypting people’s phone data once a judge has given permission for them to request it from Apple/Google.
Now, I’m not familiar with “Lockdown Mode”. Maybe that uses separate encryption to encrypt data stored on your phone that ISN’T cloud synced data. But even then, if that Lockdown Mode is software created by the manufacturer, then they could have the decryption algorithm to decrypt it and I wouldn’t trust it. I would only trust open-source encryption software, like Veracrypt.
Bottom line is I’m here to guarantee you that if the data is synced with a cloud, which most people’s phone data is, it absolutely can be obtained by law enforcement.
Not that it’s particularly relevant, but typically when law enforcement get into the data, it’s usually because they have reasonable suspicion and it’s usually kiddie porn or chat logs proving they were trying to meet up with underage individuals. And I’m here to tell you that shit is way more prevalent than I think most people realize.
You can read more about lock down mode here: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/105120
Again, like you said, what is described in the article is a big claim, and it should require a big proof, not some trust-me-bro apple marketing.
Just because someone has an iPhone doesn’t mean the other person writing about it is advertising the product.