Speaking at Common Cause 's 'Blueprint for Democracy' conference , Edward Snowden spoke about surveillance, personal freedoms and, of course, the San Bernadino iPhone.
“The FBI says Apple has the ‘exclusive technical means’ to unlock the phone,” Edward Snowden said. “Respectfully, that's bullshit.”
Edward Snowden posted on Twitter a little later:
The global technological consensus is against the FBI. Why? Here's one example: https://t.co/t2JHOLK8iU #FBIvsApple https://t.co/mH1ZXOOQ1E
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) March 8, 2016
The link will take you to an excerpt from Daniel Kahn Gillmor of the American Civil Liberties Union that better analyzes the FBI's request that it requires Apple's assistance to bypass the "self-delete" feature.
Gillmor isn't alone. iOS security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski published a piece last week detailing the FBI's mistakes in the San Bernadino case.
More specifically, changing the iCloud password prevented the FBI from retrieving an unencrypted iCloud backup directly from Apple's servers.
In fact, security researchers have already suggested a few other ways the FBI could hack into an encrypted iPhone.
These methods are expensive, time-consuming, and some could ultimately lead to physical destruction of the device's memory, but they could work. No one mentioned alternatives during a congressional hearing last week, when FBI Director James Comey argued that the FBI couldn't access the data without Apple's help.
But aside from expensive and dangerous hacks, the CIA is another alternative. Of course, the CIA is never mentioned in such conversations, but it is the same agency that has been trying to crack Apple devices for almost a decade.
The San Bernardino iPhone is a pretext as the focus of the big picture shifts to the public debate it created. It seems that behind the scenes the FBI is actually after new legislation, not the terrorist's iPhone.
https://theintercept.com/2016/03/08/snowden-fbi-claim-that-only-apple-can-unlock-phone-is-bullshit/
