- What are the ins and outs of unlocking this iPhone?
Surely, it's just one phone. There's devil's advocate for you.
- Well, the FBI started off in this case, saying they wanted to unlock just one phone.
That was a phone that belonged to the government, anyway, and was used by a dead terrorist,
and as he was dead, he had no privacy rights.
But once we started to dig into it, it turned out that there had been dozens to hundreds of similar cases
where the FBI wanted Apple and others to create tools to get at stuff, and they weren't willing.
And, clearly, this was the photogenic case that the FBI thought they could use to batter down the door.
Now, it's an enormous expansion of government surveillance powers
because, traditionally in America,
if the police got a warrant, that gave them the right to look,
but it didn't give them the right to compel the suspect's neighbors or other people to help them.
And, in particular, if you take the rights to order a company
to provide a weakened version of its software,
there is a big problem about who else will want that weakened version of the software–
that golden key–and what they're going to do with it.
- What is this golden key? How would that work?
If you've locked something, you've locked it, haven't you?
- Well, on an iPhone or an Android phone, or any other electronic device,
the lock that a user can deploy to encrypt his data or her data using a password
is largely implemented in software on the device,
and the software can be updated–and it typically is, once a month or so–
to have patches against whatever security vulnerabilities have been discovered.
So, if you can somehow subvert or coerce the update process,
you can turn the update into a golden key.
And this, for law enforcement, must be very thrilling, but for everybody else, it's disastrous,
because if people start worrying that software updates might give the government or a foreign government
access to their stuff, they'll turn it off.
And the consequences of that for Internet security could be really, really serious.
- So, I'm thinking of a real-world, non-digital example of this.
Is this like you've gone and bought a safe with very strong metal walls,
and then the company who sold you the safe can turn those walls into jelly?
- Well, yeah, if the company has got a secret 12-digit engineering access code
for use by its own technicians only–when they attend
a customer for a bank whose branch manager has died and didn't write down the combination.
And the safe manufacturer's technician can then enter this 12-digit magic code and unlock the bank vault.
Well, that's very convenient if you're a safe manufacturer.
But, then, if the FBI says, "We want you to give us this safe magic code because there's one of these
safes in the Chinese embassy," and you do so, right?
And then that 12-digit code gets out because Mr. Snowden puts it in his latest batch of revelations,
and then the Chinese and the Mafia all have this magic 12-digit code, then you're absolutely hosed.
And there's an example of that from Juniper routers.
Juniper make routers–you know, the telephone switches for the Internet.
And some years ago, it seems the NSA got a backdoor on one of these routers,
presumably because they got one of their people to get a job at Juniper,
or they subverted someone who was already there.
And, we learned from the Snowden documents that this backdoor existed.
And what happened, then, was that the Russians and Chinese and others went looking for it and found it.
And, now, Juniper routers,
half of whose outputs are sold in the USA, are being used by bad guys overseas to attack America
far more than they are used by the American intelligence agencies to attack targets in China.
And this is blow-back; this is what happens when you start abusing infrastructure and other trustworthy
facilities for your own intelligence purposes. It can come back and bite you.
And that's one of the reasons why former senior American intelligence officials–
Hayden, Roberts and so on are now against encryption backdoors.
A number of agencies have dreamed about and sometimes implemented NOBUS capabilities–
And there is a very long history of these "nobody but us" capabilities
suddenly becoming capabilities that many nations had.
Another example is the atomic bomb.
When the Americans used it in 1945,
they reckoned it might be decades before the Soviets figured out how to build one.
But, of course, within three years, the Soviets had it, too,
and we had the nuclear standoff of the Cold War.
- Here in the UK, though, that's not going to affect us, is it?
This is an iPhone in America, and it's American laws we're talking about.
- The FBI case is really, really critical for Britain because of the Investigatory Powers bill
that's now going through Parliament.
Now, the Investigatory Powers bill
gives the home secretary the power to order communications service providers
to help law enforcement with warrants.
Now, in the old days, that just meant that British Telecom had to let in the chap from GCHQ
with his crocodile clips to attach a tape recorder to your phone line.
But nowadays, that most communication is being handled by Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Twitter,
and so on, it's very, very different.
And the bill has the facility for the home secretary to give a secret technical capability notice
to a services company saying that they must make available a certain wiretap or surveillance capability.
Now, because foreign firms objected, they put a clause in the draft bill which says
that there's a defense if it's technically impractical to provide the facility, you don't have to do it.
And, also, if it's against the law in the company's country of origin, you don't have to do it.
But, now, if the FBI succeeded in compelling Apple to provide a golden key for Apple products in the US courts,
and Apple then make that golden key and use it only once,
then Teresa May (UK Home Secretary) can put a secret order on Apple in the UK saying,
"We would really rather like to have one of these golden keys, too please. Kindly deliver it to GCHQ
within the next 30 days or go to jail, and you may not tell anybody that you've given us this golden key."
And what's going to happen, then, is that the French will do the same.
Do Apple give a key to the French? Well, perhaps, because the French are a civilized country
and a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and so on.
And then the Italians will want one, too.
And–now hang on a minute, Silvio Berlusconi was in cahoots with the Mafia for many years
and abused state facilities to do the Mafia's bidding–do you really want to give it to the Italians?
Well, perhaps, given European structures, you have to.
And, if you give it to the Italians, the Greeks want one.
And then the Egyptians want one. And then the Saudis want one.
And, pretty soon, just about everybody except the government of North Korea has got a golden key to your iPhone.
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- I have been speaking to people in the big service companies,
and an example of the thing that they suffer and that really bothers them is this...
- [multiple voices]