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Comment by moonshinefe | Hacker News Reader

The fact that Apple has made this issue very public (with http://www.apple.com/customer-letter/) is unprecedented almost (Lavabit and SOPA had some similarities). I applaud them for taking a stand and not just giving in.

If this legal precedent gets set that the FBI can force US tech companies to break into their own customers' encrypted data, you can bet the industry will lose millions if not billions of dollars worldwide in tainted reputation.

Who's going to buy US companies' devices that claim privacy via encryption if they're easily backdoored at the FBI's request?

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> Who's going to buy US companies' devices that claim privacy via encryption if they're easily backdoored at the FBI's request?

Forget about customer buying power, courts in europe are using the US's laws to show how EU organisations can't legally use US companies for many things.

Is that true? Armed with a court order, the FBI can search a U.S. house, compel banks to turn over financial information, compel accountants to turn over records, etc. Yet people worldwide extensively use those American services.

That's not a similar example to what's going on here.

Your example would have to include a situation in which the FBI makes copies of the keys to the house, copies of the hard-drives, etc. Then inevitably makes it embarrassingly easy for other parties to get access to those as well, permanently reducing your net security to almost zilch regardless of the outcome of the context and warrant.

And worse, in the process of gaining access to that one house and hard-drive, they simultaneously gain the potential to access millions of homes and hard-drives that have nothing to do with the warrant, and then those millions of houses and hard-drives see their net security reduced to essentially nothing.

They're offering to let Apple do the unlock themselves and just hand over the data.

And that establishes a precedent. So, in a future case that is less sensational, the court could order to Apple to unlock that phone as well and Apple would have to comply. Apple doesn't get to pick and choose which court orders it complies with. That goes for court orders in the US, China, Canada, etc...

Slow down there, you're moving the goal posts way too fast.

If you have an argument, stick with it.

If Apple doesn't want to look bad complying to FBI requests, they shouldn't have put a backdoor in their software.

Apple cannot do the unlock. They're attempting to force Apple write new software that will make it easier to brute force the passcode.

Whether they force Apple to also do the brute force themselves, or the FBI does the brute force, is not really the important part.

No, this would not reduce the net security of anyone at all. The FBI isn't asking for a master key to everything, or a backdoor to all iPhones. They're asking for the data on this one single device.

In other words, if some other party got the modified software, it wouldn't do anything. The software was asked to be device locked, which is trivial to do.

The reduced security you worry about already happened on the iPhone.

Also who's going to ever install software updates anymore?

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