You won't believe this, but… nothing useful found on Farook iPhone The iPhone at the center of the huge public fight between the FBI and Apple has "nothing of real significance" on it – just as we suspected. CBS News reports it has been told by a "law enforcement source" that the phone of San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook does not contain any information of practical assistance in the …
That has crossed my mind, too. Perhaps the FBI want RW access so the can put terrorist cat videos on the phone.
Either way, the guy was a good corporate citizen. He only used his personal phone for terrorism and the work provided phone for work.
You've got to have some principles...
Given that they found nothing "useful" on the phone leaves the claim that it was cracked open to question to anyone who takes an evidence-based view of such matters. So does the fact that they haven't disclosed how they're supposed to have cracked it. Or who did it except that it wasn't the company that commentators expected it to be.
They have retreated from a situation which worked out unexpectedly bad for them in PR terms and done so with face intact.
Smashing up (assuming these words are accurate) doesn't really get very far down the road to secure destruction. A square cm of platter would still contain huge chunks of data. A square mm of flash drive might contain a whole raft of files. Any forensic expert worth their groceries could extract vast amounts of info from the fragments.
MoD: Secure Erase, smash up, grind to dust, heat dust well above the Curie temperature, load the ash into barrels, place the barrels in a locked and monitored dungeon under an old castle, within a secure Military base, and keep them there 'forever'.
My usual HD destruction method is to remove the platters and bend them into pretty shapes. The stresses alone will destroy most of the magnetic information. Good luck reading the rest. I guess my discarded cat video porn is safe.
For those who are not intelligent design/creationists, it would be a good time to revisit the principles of evolutionary theory. Just as we were not created neither were societies. Our future as a species is not dependent on smartness. Which of our individual biological functions is controlled by us ? Yes, we do get toilet trained but our control is quite limited in that area. If allowed to eat as much as we want in a single sitting , we also would quickly come up against a limit beyond our control and the same can be said for holding our breath. Just as evolution has resulted in our biological systems being mostly autonomic, the same can be said for that adaptation we call society. Most humans are born with a brain that prefers conformity to society. This must be the case because without that preference societies could not exist. In a real sense, conformity is much more important than what we like to think of as intelligence. For reasons that have nothing to do with concern for the masses, leadership through inheritance passed from the scene. This meant that an alternate mechanism had to come into existence for leadership to be determined. If to be a leader one must marshal a following, it is self-evident that those who are best at marshaling a following will end up leading. One would do better to realize that democracy is really a form closer to marketing than the myth of a well informed citizenry choosing a leader from among their own.
I would really, REALLY love to know where this was going, but it seems to have wandered off the path of rationality and into the soggy ditch of incoherence. What I THINK you seem to be saying, is that we like being in an ordered system, regardless of how badly it's being run. And that those who are good at leading will end up leading. That certainly didn't need a massive wall of unformatted test to say, however. Even amanfromars1 has a better grasp of paragraphs.
And after all that, what on earth has said comment got to do with the subject at hand? This is an article on how nothing important was found on a phone most guessed was useless, not a diatribe on the intricacies of human biology and social development.
You could have just said the FBI has idiots in charge, would have been MUCH easier to read and agree with!
"Regardless, the FBI used the existence of the phone and the shocking nature of the crime to wage a public war with Apple over encryption and access to electronic goods. "
And if they hadn't made every effort to unlock the phone you would be criticising them for not following every lead.
"Just shows how lame they are they can't even hack a phone" would have been the tenor of the conversation from the almighty enlightened tech savants
I missed that.
I know my wok phone's encryption key has a master key held by the IT people at my workplace - just in case I forget the key.
In the case of this work iPhone, wouldn't the companies IT policy mean that a similar key was held with the IT admin team at the company?
The FBI don't know the procedure to unlock it? So they just let some random guy/company have their possibly important piece of evidence to unlock it, without any idea how they were going to do it?
If i were the FBI, I'd want to know exactly what was being done and how it worked to ensure that it wouldn't in any way damage any evidence on the phone..
What if they attempted it and then it triggered the wipe procedure? Whoops sorry guys.. They'd have thought about that situation and would have sense checked what was going on themselves first.
The FBI had no choice but to search for information on this phone to conduct its exhaustive investigation.
Image if they just threw it away, it fell into the hands of a media organization that cracked it and found vital information on the San Bernardino Shooting. Would you be one of the people criticizing the FBI and asking for resignations ?
As an Australian, we welcome immigrants, provided they meet strict criteria and are able to contribute. Europeans must be rolling in money with a social services infrastructure the envy of the world, jobs aplenty, and budgets in surplus. Brussels is the hub of efficiency! Wish we could be so generous...
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