Snowden: FBI's claim it can't unlock the San Bernardino iPhone is 'bulls***'

The FBI can access everything.

What they want is the keys handed to them, or the laws changed so they can take them constitutionally.

REmember back in the 1980s when cell phones first started becoming a thing? The FBI claimed that they couldn't crack the cell phone signals, and then gleefully followed mob bosses around listening to their conversations....

Many mob bosses went to jail because they thought they were encrypted.

I suspect many ISIS cells are using iPhones because they think the exact same thing.

I remember reading an article...I believe it was on RT, (can't get a link as of yet, sorry) a search will find it easily though, where McAfee gave the detailed instructions of how easy it was. Would take 30 min. Include in search terms "software engineer and a mechanical engineer".

Once again...the story we are being fed by 3 letters/insert n'th favourite manipulator here"_____" is total BULL! What a surprise hey :/

Duh it is bull#.

I was able to get my friends forgotten iDevice password using free online software. It makes no sense that they can't unlock it.

Shhh...Would they advertise the fact they can't get in ?

So, go ahead bad guys. Nothing to see here.

You outsmarted the FBI. Feel free to do your filthy business.

If you have an IPhone you can plot with impunity.

originally posted by: Blackmarketeer

Edward Snowden, the whistleblower whose NSA revelations sparked a debate on mass surveillance, has waded into the arguments over the FBI’s attempt to force Apple to help it unlock the iPhone 5C of one of the San Bernardino shooters.

The FBI says that only Apple can deactivate certain passcode protections on the iPhone, which will allow law enforcement to guess the passcode by using brute-force.

Talking via video link from Moscow to the Common Cause Blueprint for a Great Democracy conference, Snowden said: “The FBI says Apple has the ‘exclusive technical means’ to unlock the phone. Respectfully, that’s bull#.”

Snowden: FBI's claim it can't unlock the San Bernardino iPhone is 'bull#'

The Woz had this to add:

“Verizon turned over all the phone records and SMS messages. So they want to take this other phone that the two didn’t destroy, which was a work phone. It’s so lame and worthless to expect there’s something on it and to get Apple to expose it.”

You had to suspect the FBI was not being honest over their public statement of needing Apple to create a software backdoor for their smart phones, when it was revealed the police had changed the password on the suspects phone (changing the password prevented the phone from backing up to the cloud.) To reset a password you need the password, which clearly they did have.

The head of the NSA said that they're one terrorist attack away from getting Congress finally onboard with this level of surveillance. The San Bernadino shooting looks much more like a false flag every day.

WORKING LINK:
Snowden: FBI's claim it can't unlock the San Bernardino iPhone is 'bullsht'

ATS is blocking the link. All I can suggest is go to www.theguardian.com... and search the headline above.

Funny that, The phone records most likely to implicate the FBI or whoever it was that run the show, are locked up in a pone they cant burgle. Funny how none of the phones that implicate lone wolfs in mass terro events never seem to have this problem, strange that.

The reality is that the government owns Apple and other large corporations. This controversy is just to keep everyone in a trance. Apple is giving you a false sense of security.

Assassination of Steve Jobs and Apple – F.B.I. Hoax (VIDEO)

The Mainstream Media has been absolutely giddy over the alleged “controversy” between the F.B.I. (Federal Bureau of Investigation) and Apple, regarding the I-Phone’s touted “undefeatable” security system.

First of all, anytime the Mainstream Media universally hypes something, be wary of steamrolling propaganda. It is no secret that the same billionaires behind Apple are the very same ones who own all the major media outlets, which are constantly selling their own private agendas, masquerading as “independent news.” Independent News died shortly after the Watergate scandal, with Reagan’s “media deregulation”, which allowed formerly illegal monopolies of television stations and newspapers to be granted, innumerably at will, to the highest bidder. Since this time thirty years ago, the situation has only gotten progressively worse, and exponentially so.

Not known to the general public, the Department of Offense . . . Sorry, “De-fense”, through their “Intelligence Agencies”, spent nearly two hundred billion dollars over the last twenty years buying up companies like Google, Facebook, America Online, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, and scores of other high-tech and telecommunications firms, in an effort to “legally” access user data. (This is one of their best kept secrets . . . Oops . . . Until now.) Surely you have seen (yet never read) the user release forms required to participate in these services? They basically give “the company” the right to store and access user data at will. As the customer “assumes” that the government will not have access to their data unless a search warrant is presented to the host company, they fail to consider what their privacy would be if the owner of the company IS the Government itself!

The C.I.A. (Central Intelligence Agency) has been using “front-names” for disguised agency owned and operated businesses since 1947. The same is true of the N.S.A. (National Security Agency) and “Homeland Security”. By secretly owning Google, Facebook, America Online, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, as well as various telecommunications companies, “technically” the United States Government does not need a search warrant to access user data, as the owner of the company already has the express consent of the user to do so with their client’s own volition, which they “voluntarily” gave when they accepted the “terms of service”, though it was through a nonnegotiable one-way contract, mandatory to receive the services, of which are often a necessity to have gainful employment and provide for one’s family. (Create a new account from one of these giants and read the mandatory contract, if you don’t believe me.) All of the search warrants previously issued for such data, and the presently perceived public “squabbling” between Apple and the F.B.I., is purely theatrical, to keep their operations and ownership a secret.

Just as with the debate over the mandatory issuance of vaccines to the public in order to allegedly “protect others”, no one is allowed to publically make, through the major media outlets “coincidentally” owned by the very same vaccine companies, the ultra-simple argument, that if vaccines really worked and a person advocating the forceful inoculation of others had their own vaccines, then it would not matter if the rest of the world was unvaccinated, as the mandatory vaccine pushers would still be protected themselves from the diseases they feared getting from the unvaccinated. Likewise, in the puppet show that is the mainstream media, no one ever makes the simple suggestion for Apple to merely privately decode the phone in question on their own and then hand the data over to the F.B.I. on a flash-drive, without having to give them the proprietary software for decoding this or other devices. (Duh!)

Let us not forget that Apple is, allegedly, the largest company on the entire planet! As such, it would be EXTREMELY naïve to think that they are somehow enemies of the very government whose generous one-sided regulations brought them into their most prosperous existence! It was the incredibly wise William Shakespeare who basically said, “EVERYTHING is staged!” When it comes to the most powerful GOVERNMENT on Earth and the most powerful COMPANY on Earth, engaging in a one-on-one dance that “appears” to be argumentative, you better believe it is COMPLETELY STAGED FOR PUBLIC RELATIONS!! The United States Government simply wants to separate itself from the company it secretly owns, make its deluded citizens mistakenly believe that their intelligence community (which has technology at least thirty years more advanced than the best civilian tech-gadgets on the market) is too weak to decode the public’s private correspondences (thus lulling them into a false sense of security), and promote to those most interested in personal data security to jump onboard with the company which actually provides the least thereof.

Very high-ranking sources informed me that former Apple C.E.O. Steve Jobs’ death of “cancer”, was actually an acutely conducted assassination, specifically initiated because of his unwillingness to sell out to the United States Federal Government and their Spy Agencies. As Apple was emerging as the leader in personal computer and telephone privacy, the spy agencies of America were not going to take “no” for an answer in their demand for FULL cooperation. What a “coincidence” that as soon as Steve Jobs’ N.S.A. appointed replacement Tim Cook took the helm (who successfully infiltrated the company in 1998 as vice president, with the promise of quadrupling sales), Apple’s security IMMEDIATELY took a nosedive, as demonstrated by their “new and improved” operating system, which no longer allowed the user to permanently delete data from their computer’s hard drives. Likewise, the whole “I-Cloud” platform, also “coincidentally” introduced just after Steve Jobs’ death, is another masterful plan of Cook’s to make user data even MORE accessible to the government’s spy agencies, all the while promoting it under the disguise of “better protecting” users’ data.

Just as thousands of priests who were seen as protectors of children were later proven to be using their office as a disguise to molest the dependents under their care, Apple’s purposefully “leaked” memo of their bogus concern for their customers’ privacy rights, is nothing more than clever theatre, skillfully orchestrated to hide the blatant fact of their complete complicity and willingness to share ALL customer data with the Federal Government, even tricking their own customers into “legally” granting them such permission to do so, through their mandatory service agreements, just in case they get caught in their own tangled web of deceit.

Be sure to watch the video. He covers more than what he wrote.

a reply to: ExPatRat

There is literally no proof of the CIA owning Apple or the NSA owning any fortune 500 company.

That is just nonsense. I'd love to see some proof, but it just ain't there. Yes they've had cover businesses of course, but not the likes of those ones.

~Tenth

So I was in a meeting with FBI tonight when the ASAC made a joke about being able to monitor everyone's calls and texts in the room....

To which I said "well, not if you're on an Apple apparently...."

The look of shock and amusement on his face was priceless.... Most everyone was laughing. I don't think he expected that response.

Me personally, I believe that the NSA already has the means to access these devices. All this theater in the public spotlight is just that, but cleverly crafted to make us all think that all these defense agencies are powerless. When in fact the exact opposite is true. I have to agree with part of what ExPatRat stated above, this all seems VERY staged.

I just shared this in another thread about this. The FBI is misleading the people.

The "key" is destroyed when more than 10 passcodes fail. The data is still there, but the key to access it gets erased from flash storage, rending the data unrecoverable. Well, there's a really easy way around that for the FBI:

The largest chip on the back (outlined in red above) is the NAND flash, where all the data is stored, including both the encrypted filesystem and the Effaceable Storage.

The FBI can simply remove this chip from the circuit board (“desolder” it), connect it to a device capable of reading and writing NAND flash, and copy all of its data. It can then replace the chip, and start testing passcodes. If it turns out that the auto-erase feature is on, and the Effaceable Storage gets erased, they can remove the chip, copy the original information back in, and replace it. If they plan to do this many times, they can attach a “test socket” to the circuit board that makes it easy and fast to do this kind of chip swapping.

ACLU

And there you go -- how to get into a locked iPhone without ruining your chances to get inside. Just copy the damn key before you start a brute force password bypass. Then, restore from backup when the key gets destroyed. Copy, repeat. Use a "test socket" to make it easier.

It's not like there are hundreds of these phones a year that the FBI needs access to. They have the money and people to do this themselves. They don't need Apple to code in a "backdoor" that could be abused or exploited by hackers or a foreign government.

So, I'm not surprised Apple has said, "No". Apple knows the FBI can do what was described above, and in this recent case -- the FBI screwed up and erased the "key" before it could be copied and backed up. That's on them. They should have done things more carefully, and it's not Apple's fault.

originally posted by: CIAGypsy
So I was in a meeting with FBI tonight when the ASAC made a joke about being able to monitor everyone's calls and texts in the room....

To which I said "well, not if you're on an Apple apparently...."

The look of shock and amusement on his face was priceless.... Most everyone was laughing. I don't think he expected that response.

From my experience, agents don't seem to have the most robust senses of humor.

Good at making you comfortable, and quite obvious they've undergone extensive training in human psychology. They seemed to know exactly what and how to say what needed to be said to get the information they were seeking without seeming like they were even asking.

originally posted by: MystikMushroom

originally posted by: CIAGypsy
So I was in a meeting with FBI tonight when the ASAC made a joke about being able to monitor everyone's calls and texts in the room....

To which I said "well, not if you're on an Apple apparently...."

The look of shock and amusement on his face was priceless.... Most everyone was laughing. I don't think he expected that response.

From my experience, agents don't seem to have the most robust senses of humor.

Good at making you comfortable, and quite obvious they've undergone extensive training in human psychology. They seemed to know exactly what and how to say what needed to be said to get the information they were seeking without seeming like they were even asking.

I would disagree... All the guys (men and women) that I've worked with have been really great people and love to cut up on regular occasions. They are still human (news flash to some...) and not much different than the rest of us.

When I made the joke about Apple, it was obvious that the ASAC *wanted* to laugh (oh, the irony) about it but was also a little caught off guard at being put on the spot from an unlikely source.

a reply to: CIAGypsy

Oh yeah they're human, and they're as friendly as any other human being. They just have that LEO-muted sense of humor when working in an official capacity. They're not like Mulder from the X-Files.

And I suppose it depends on the situation you find yourself in with them. If they are enlisting your help, they're probably not going to be cracking jokes or laughing at yours...

I suppose asking some kind of X-Files type question would only elicit a groan or eye roll. Like I can imagine trying to lead the special agent into finishing this sentence:

"So...the truth is.......?"

*blink blink*

"Come on...you know, the truth is.......?"

*frown*

"I'm not agent Mulder, and yes I have seen an episode or two of the X-Files, and no I don't have an 'I believe' poster in my office."

Bwaahaha!

a reply to: MystikMushroom

That would take an incredibly long time, though, even with a test socket. It's not just the issue of the data being deleted after 10 fails, it's that the level of processing power to brute-force AES encryption just doesn't exist. With current hardware, you're looking at timescales in the billions of years to brute-force crack AES-128, and even longer if the AES-256 cipher is being used. The ACLU have no idea what they're talking about.

This is shaping up to be a major fight when it comes to civil liberties and computers. Governments want encryption either inaccessible to the public, or forcibly backdoored on release, while the tech-aware public are starting to want secure encryption protocols for a variety of reasons. It's gonna be an ugly fight, and odds are it'll get worse before it gets better.

a reply to: ShadeWolf
But, we are not talking about cracking AES here, just cracking the users passcode to access the data. After 10 tries, it locks, pop out old chip, insert fresh one, rinse repeat. Heck, you could even have it all running in an emulator that can (in software) reprogram after lock. Not impossible to interface the phone at the chip level with a software emulator. All automated, running at computer speed to crack the passcode.


But then, that is out-of-the-box thinking. Most likely beyond the robotic thought process of the agency.

originally posted by: MystikMushroom
a reply to: CIAGypsy

Oh yeah they're human, and they're as friendly as any other human being. They just have that LEO-muted sense of humor when working in an official capacity. They're not like Mulder from the X-Files.

And I suppose it depends on the situation you find yourself in with them. If they are enlisting your help, they're probably not going to be cracking jokes or laughing at yours...

Again, this hasn't been my experience with them. They've always been very down-to-earth and fun, even cracking jokes and playing minor pranks. Even when working in an official capacity. And no...I haven't been the TARGET.

originally posted by: MystikMushroom
a reply to: CIAGypsy
I suppose asking some kind of X-Files type question would only elicit a groan or eye roll. Like I can imagine trying to lead the special agent into finishing this sentence:

"So...the truth is.......?"

*blink blink*

"Come on...you know, the truth is.......?"

*frown*

"I'm not agent Mulder, and yes I have seen an episode or two of the X-Files, and no I don't have an 'I believe' poster in my office."

Bwaahaha!

One of the agents gave a powerpoint presentation at our meeting last night and had a slide where he put a small picture of Mulder & Scully in the corner. Neither the presentation or the topics discussed had anything to do with X-Files, aliens, entertainment, or anything else in that arena...he just put it in their to be funny or catch your eye.

I think you have just worked with the wrong agents, my friend....lol

a reply to: Blackmarketeer

Looks to me like Edward Snowden is trying to tell us all the obvious truth in an attempt gain our trust. Anyway that's how I feel about it. This whole whistleblower thing is lame.

I'm surprised no one mentioned the "StingRay"

There is variety of setups and how it's deployed... application use..

Funny thing though with the company that designs them..(Harris corporate) patient information is hard to find..

Wiki Stingray catcher device (Fake cell towers)

a reply to: Y3K89

Local police use those, they're small enough to fit in the trunk of a squad car, so watch your cell phone calls if you get pulled over.