Headline March 27, 2016/ ''' *AN... APPLE-iPHONE ...A DAY* ''''

''' *AN... APPLE-iPHONE ...A DAY* ''''

The Case For Apple:

''This.......is about much more than a single phone or a single investigation.At stake is the data security of hundreds of millions of law-abiding people, and setting a dangerous precedent that threatens everyone's civil liberties.''  That's Tim Cook, Apple CEO 

Four important pieces of context are necessary to see the trouble with the Apple order:

*[The FBI James Comey] would like back door available to American law enforcement in all  devices globally.And, frankly, I think on balance that actually harms Americans safety and security]. And that's Michael Hayden, former NSA director. 

1. IT COULD AFFORD the government a way make tech companies help with investigations. Law-enforcement and  intelligence agencies  have for years wanted Congress to update the-

Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which spells out the obligations of telephone companies and Internet providers to assist government investigations, to deal with the growing prevalence of encryption-

Perhaps be requiring companies to build the government back doors into secure devices and messaging apps. In the face of strong opposition from tech companies, security experts and civil-liberties groups, Congress has so far refused.

By falling back on an unprecedentedly broad reading of the 1789 All Writs Act to compel Apple to produce hacking tools, the government is seeking an entry point from the courts it hasn't been able to obtain legislatively. Moreover, saddling companies with an obligation to break their own security-

Will raise the cost of resisting efforts to mandate vulnerabilities baked in by design.

2. THIS PUBLIC FIGHT could affect secret orders from the government. Several provisions of the federal laws governing digital intelligence surveillance require companies to provide  'technical assistance''  to spy agencies.

Everything we know suggests that government lawyers are likely to argue for an expansive reading of that obligation  -and may already have done so.

That fight, however, will unfold secret, through classified arguments before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. 

The precedent set in the public fight may help determine how ambitious the government can be in seeking secret orders that would require companies to produce hacking or surveillance meant to compromise their devices and applications.

3. THE CONSEQUENCES of a precedent permitting this sort of coding conscription are likely to be enormous in scope. In November last, Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance said his office alone had encountered-

111 Apple devices that it had been unable to open over a one-year period. Once it has been established that Apple can be forced to build one skeleton key, the inevitable flood of similar requests   -from government at all levels, foreign and domestic-

Could effectively force the firm and peers to develop internal department dedicated to building spyware for governments, just as many already have full-time compliance teams dedicated to dealing with ordinary search warrants.

This would create an internal conflict of interest: the same company must work to both secure its products and undermine that security. And the better it does the first job, the larger the headaches it creates for itself in doing the second.

It would also, as Apple's Cook argues, make it far more difficult to prevent those cracking tools from escaping into the wild or being replicated.

4. MOST OMINOUSLY,  the effects of a win over the FBI in this case almost certainly won't be limited to smartphones. Over the past year, I worked with a group of experts at Harvard Law School, states the author, on a report that predicted governments would respond to the challenges encryption poses by turning to the burgeoning Internet of Things to create a global network of surveillance devices.

Armed with code blessed by developers' secret key, governments will be able to deliver spyware in the form of trusted updates to a host sensorenabled appliances.

Think of not just the webcam and microphone on your laptop but also voice-controlled devices like Amazon's echo, smart televisions, network routers, wearable computing devices, even Hello Barbie.

The global market for both traditional computing devices and the new breed of networked appliances depends on an underlying ecosystem of trust     -trust that security updates pushed out by developers and signed by their cryptographic keys will do what's promised.

The developer keys that mark code as trusted are critical to that ecosystem, which will become even more difficult to sustain if developers can be systematically forced to deploy the keys at the behest of governments.

Users and consumers will reasonably be even more distrustful if the scope of governments ability to demand spyware disguised as authentic updates is determined not by a clear framework but by a hodgepodge of public and secret court decisions.

These, then, are the high stakes of Apple's resistance to the FBI's order: not whether the federal government can read one dead terrorism suspect's phone but whether technology companies can be conscripted to undermine global trust in our computing devices.

That's a staggering high price to pay for any investigation.

To sum, Sundar Pichal, Google CEO illuminates penetratingly : 

*We build secure products to keep your information safe, and we give law enforcement access to data based on valid legal orders.

But that's wholly different than requiring companies to enable hacking of customer devices and data*.

With respectful dedication to  all the Leaders, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society and the Ecosystem 2011:

''' Smartphone's Lost Cause '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless