Encryption Showdown? FBI Can’t Get into Texas Church Shooter’s Phone

There should be exceptions, especially for such heinous crimes as this one was. Seeing the flags at half staff and having to stare at them all day at work makes me very sad and sick to my stomach. Such terrible times we live in.
 
Eh... they'll go around in circles for a few weeks then claim they paid someone break the encryption and wammo everything is seen!
 
Name calling / Insults
__hollywood|meow said:
some people heard some news about violence & are sad now? well shit, i guess we'd better burn the constitution.
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TFA didn't say if the failure to obtain phone data is due to encryption or just an effective access lock. They should have all the probable cause they could possibly need for the proper warrants to access the phone and any Internet comms he did.
 
krenum, i dont really care if you find my phrasing insensitive or not. you dont get to violate someones constitutional rights under due (& open) legal process just because of a headline, the nature of a crime, or any reason at all. thats an excuse called appeal to emotion & its a logical fallacy.

now, a bigger point of contention regarding this issue should be the bare fact that if the FBI really needs help getting into anything, much less a phone, then they are inept - & if they dont, then they are liars. neither option is promising
 
__hollywood|meow said:
now, a bigger point of contention regarding this issue should be the bare fact that if the FBI really needs help getting into anything, much less a phone, then they are inept - & if they dont, then they are liars. neither option is promising
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AES 256 encryption and similar don’t have magical FBI backdoors.
Brute Force it is.


Now as to the concerns of the FBI being entirely trustworthy. We share doubts there. The way Hillary’s e-mail investigation was handled was a recent example that breed mistrust.
 
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Archaea said:
AES 256 encryption and similar don’t have magical FBI backdoors.
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I wouldn't put any faith in that, and I don't, meaning I don't trust even encryption in this day and age. I know folks will defend it forever, including people like Edward Snowden himself and many many others but, somehow I really just don't believe it's nearly as secure as folks out there seem to believe it to be.

As for whether or not there's some known flaws in all the modern encryption standards and the few people aware of that fact and how to exploit it to crack most anything that's using AES is just something that time will have to prove out if it's even true.

But then again, nobody outside of a handful of people in the United Kingdom ever knew about the team of mathematicians and researchers that cracked ENIGMA back in WWII - that secret, a relatively fucking huge one, was kept practically airtight until recently in the timeline of modern history so, even in today's highly interconnected and encrypted world secrets can still be held pretty tightly.

Hell, we still don't officially know the formulas for Coca-Cola and Pepsi, right? If someone can keep a formula for sugar water so well protected, surely a major flaw in the most popular encryption algorithm in use around the world today could be kept under wraps just as easily, right? :D
 
MarkVI said:
Agreed, but the manufacturer should be compelled to unlock the device when presented with a court order. The problem is that our police (at all levels) feel like they should be able to bypass the courts. The system of court issued warrants is supposed to protect us from overreach.
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As soon as you have a law that compels them to write software to unlock the phone, the government will use the courts to do this regularly. If not in public courts then via FISA, and FISA is synonymous with overreach.
 
azuza001 said:
5$ says it is an iPhone.

Seriously though, I am all for encryption and privacy. I don't want anyone getting into my stuff whenever they want even though I have nothing to hide, that's not the point. However the moment this guy went mental and started shooting up the church his right to privacy went out the window. And the issue then are companies that don't want to have the option to unlock their own devices so that they don't have to if compelled to. It's like throwing away the key so that when asked to drive you can say "can't no key" and not just "no, I dont want to".
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So all the courts need to do is claim Azuza001 is mental and a court will order it unlocked? I'm pretty sure that can be arranged. There's absolutely no doubt that if Apple makes a specific build of the OS the allow it to decrypt a random iPHone, they will get requests on a daily basis to decrypt phones. AFAIK, that's literally why they made it impossible for them to decrypt the phones.
 
Tiberian said:
I wouldn't put any faith in that, and I don't, meaning I don't trust even encryption in this day and age. I know folks will defend it forever, including people like Edward Snowden himself and many many others but, somehow I really just don't believe it's nearly as secure as folks out there seem to believe it to be.

As for whether or not there's some known flaws in all the modern encryption standards and the few people aware of that fact and how to exploit it to crack most anything that's using AES is just something that time will have to prove out if it's even true.

But then again, nobody outside of a handful of people in the United Kingdom ever knew about the team of mathematicians and researchers that cracked ENIGMA back in WWII - that secret, a relatively fucking huge one, was kept practically airtight until recently in the timeline of modern history so, even in today's highly interconnected and encrypted world secrets can still be held pretty tightly.

Hell, we still don't officially know the formulas for Coca-Cola and Pepsi, right? If someone can keep a formula for sugar water so well protected, surely a major flaw in the most popular encryption algorithm in use around the world today could be kept under wraps just as easily, right? :D
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FWIW, it's an open, published encryption process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard

not some closed unvetted code based on security by obscurity. AES encryption is all math based, but with the rounds it becomes too computationally intense to brute force with foreseeable technology (until quantum computing anyway)

----------------------------

In November 2009, the first known-key distinguishing attack against a reduced 8-round version of AES-128 was released as a preprint.[26] This known-key distinguishing attack is an improvement of the rebound, or the start-from-the-middle attack, against AES-like permutations, which view two consecutive rounds of permutation as the application of a so-called Super-Sbox. It works on the 8-round version of AES-128, with a time complexity of 248, and a memory complexity of 232. 128-bit AES uses 10 rounds, so this attack isn't effective against full AES-128.

The first key-recovery attacks on full AES were due to Andrey Bogdanov, Dmitry Khovratovich, and Christian Rechberger, and were published in 2011.[27] The attack is a biclique attack and is faster than brute force by a factor of about four. It requires 2126.2 operations to recover an AES-128 key. For AES-192 and AES-256, 2190.2 and 2254.6 operations are needed, respectively. This result has been further improved to 2126.0 for AES-128, 2189.9 for AES-192 and 2254.3 for AES-256,[28] which are the current best results in key recovery attack against AES.

This is a very small gain, as a 126-bit key (instead of 128-bits) would still take billions of years to brute force on current and foreseeable hardware. Also, the authors calculate the best attack using their technique on AES with a 128 bit key requires storing 288 bits of data (though this has later been improved to 256,[28] which is 9 petabytes). That works out to about 38 trillion terabytes of data, which is more than all the data stored on all the computers on the planet in 2016. As such this is a seriously impractical attack which has no practical implication on AES security.[29]

At present, there is no known practical attack that would allow someone without knowledge of the key to read data encrypted by AES when correctly implemented.
 
Archaea said:
*snip*
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Yes, I'm aware of all that, been interested in and research encryption for many decades now as I'm sure a lot of people have, especially those that were involved with making "The Internet" what it is today with infrastructure in the 1970s/80s/90s but that still doesn't side-step the possibility that flaws exist so, I'll put my faith in the fact that Humans are some remarkably creative creatures that have done some pretty miraculous things in our time on this pale blue dot (thank you Mr. Sagan) that there's a pretty good chance such flaws may have already been noted and exploits could potentially exist that only a very small number of people know about on any level.

I already know I'm crazy just like the majority of the planet is so, I'll err on the side of caution and stick with my position on the matter. As the saying goes, "Not all conspiracies are actually just theories..." :p
 
yeah riiiiight ............... they got into the other locked iphones but not this one? I promise you there are a ton of people waiting inline to make money off the US Gov.

Laughable.

This is just a ploy for Apple to maintain it's 'privacy image' while in the same breath handing them access. That's how this shit works.

It's all just BS for the public to eat up.

They advertise this shit so the bad people out their can keep their false sense of security.
 
What a load of old shit. Distraction from the real issues. If this guy was part of some group that used cell phones to stay in contact and coordinate, he'd probably be using FB, Twitter or IM. FB and Twitter will surrender any data with the appropriate request, I'm sure they can get his phone# to them. IM has to go past the cell provider, even if encrypted. They're not saying that he had encrypted SMS they needed to investigate.

There needs to be a barrier to breach of privacy. I know the government wants that gone, but I don't see it happen just yet. AND, there are many more VERY obvious things the government COULD do to actually lessen the occurrence of these terrible events, but those things are swept aside with stupid excuses like "let's all pray" and "this is not the time to politicize.. blah blah". The low hanging fruit is NOT this guys phone. Healthcare and sensible gun control are low hanging fruit, but of course the lobbies aren't having it. Goes back to Citizens United et al.
 
You give the government a back door into a cell phone so they can get information on mass murderers, next thing you know that back door is being used for anything and everything they want regardless of severity of the crime. No thanks.
 
panhead said:
"authorities have been unable to get into the phone of Devin Patrick Kelley"

So what? There is no evidence on the phone need for his prosecution.
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How do you know?

How do you know that evidence from the phone couldn't be needed in order to prove premeditation?

How do you know that evidence from the phone could not point to an accomplice?
 
lcpiper said:
How do you know?
How do you know that evidence from the phone couldn't be needed in order to prove premeditation?
How do you know that evidence from the phone could not point to an accomplice?
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He's dead and it's unlikely he had an accomplice. I'd rather risk an unlikely accomplice gets away than set a precedent that allows the feds to get into a phone at will...and once the S/W is out there, they will do it, either by stealing the code or forcing them to unlock phones via the FISA courts. Nope, things are fine the way they are.
 
MarkVI said:
Agreed, but the manufacturer should be compelled to unlock the device when presented with a court order. The problem is that our police (at all levels) feel like they should be able to bypass the courts. The system of court issued warrants is supposed to protect us from overreach.
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Cops don't always require a warranty for a constitutionally correct search. So it's not a simple rule, never has been. Sometimes they need a warrant, in some cases they don't, but when they do need a warrant then a warrant is what they need to get.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I thought the Supreme Court had already ruled on this. You CAN be compelled to unlock a device locked with biometrics, but you cannot be compelled to unlock a device locked with a password, pin or key, as those constitute speech.
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Court can compel you to unlock your phone period - whatever method your phone (or any other device/safe/room/deposit box/etc) may use for locking and unlocking.

That means you have to hand over a key, or your biometrics, or any other physical device required to unlock.

What the court can’t do is make you ~remember~ a password/PIN/key code. If you forget it, well, all LE can do at that point is hold you tenporarily until you can remember (or call your lawyer who can get you out of that, at least until being charged with something specific )
 
vegeta535 said:
Not even that to be honest. Manufacturer shouldn't be making back door to their devices to begin with.
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I disagree. I think that there must be a mechanism in place so that access to encrypted data gain be gained when it is properly attained. If a warrant is needed they get a warrant, if a National Security letter is needed they get a National Security Letter, if no warrant is needed then they just have to ask because these companies all have legal departments, they have lawyers and if presented with a legal request that does not require a court order then they should just give up the goods.

This is my opinion.
 
Brian_B said:
Court can compel you to unlock your phone period - whatever method your phone (or any other device/safe/room/deposit box/etc) may use for locking and unlocking.

That means you have to hand over a key, or your biometrics, or any other physical device required to unlock.

What the court can’t do is make you ~remember~ a password/PIN/key code. If you forget it, well, all LE can do at that point is hold you tenporarily until you can remember (or call your lawyer who can get you out of that, at least until being charged with something specific )
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You are a little off. pick it up with "If you forget it, well, all the court can do ...... it's not about LE, it's about the court and it's authority and limits. And, if a Judge has reason to believe that a person is lying about forgetting, contempt of court can turn into a very long stay in a room without a view.
 
Mchart said:
Doesn't matter - Wouldn't work. After you don't use TouchID for 12 hours (Or it could be 24, I forget which one, I just know it's at max 24) it prompts for the PIN and/or passcode. They would have had to unlock the phone with his dead hand pretty much right then and there to get it to work assuming it hadn't already locked out or he even had touchID setup.

But honestly if I were ever a detective on the scene w/ a dead perp I can imagine myself trying to unlock the phone with someone's hand before it was completely locked out and pretend I found the phone unlocked on their dead body. Not that I imagine that situation is legal in the slightest.
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Why would you think that a dead man's rights remain in effect?

https://people.howstuffworks.com/lose-right-to-privacy-when-you-die.htm

But more to the point;
http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6185&context=jclc
 
nilepez said:
He's dead and it's unlikely he had an accomplice. I'd rather risk an unlikely accomplice gets away than set a precedent that allows the feds to get into a phone at will...and once the S/W is out there, they will do it, either by stealing the code or forcing them to unlock phones via the FISA courts. Nope, things are fine the way they are.
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Better see post #65 cause we are way passed your threat of precedent.
 
lcpiper said:
I disagree. I think that there must be a mechanism in place so that access to encrypted data gain be gained when it is properly attained. If a warrant is needed they get a warrant, if a National Security letter is needed they get a National Security Letter, if no warrant is needed then they just have to ask because these companies all have legal departments, they have lawyers and if presented with a legal request that does not require a court order then they should just give up the goods.

This is my opinion.
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Once you create a backdoor, the software is not secure. Once you create that back door, our government (as well as our enemies) will gain access and use it against us (U.S. Citizens) and our government, as well as others. There's simply too much information in a phone to give the government access whenever they want it. And for what? Nothing. Did they get anything when a company cracked the San Bernadino shooter's iPhone? AFAIK, they did not and they're unlikely to get anything new form this guys phone that will change a thing or lead to any other prosecutions.
 
What do they actually need on the phone? They need to go to the ISP/phone company and get their records if they're concerned about potential collaborators.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Unless messaging clients that send end-to-end encrypted messages were used.
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That may not give you the message content, but I'd imagine the cops'll be interested in anyone he was sending/receiving encrypted messages from.
 
MarkVI said:
Agreed, but the manufacturer should be compelled to unlock the device when presented with a court order.
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Or the user could buy a phone that can not be unlocked, not even by the manufacturer.
 
Snowdensjacket said:
You know why we need assault rifles? Because that oppressive government has them already.
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What about a hummer with a .50 cal belt fed machine gun? The gov't has those. Can I have one? Or how about a Javelin rocket launcher, those are pretty cool, I could see that being handy during an oppressive gov't take over. I'm obtaining my pilots license right now, can I attach a 5 barrel gatling gun to it though? Those seem to work well on our oppressive gov't airplanes. What about nukes. The gov't as nukes. Can I have a nuke?
 
panhead said:
"authorities have been unable to get into the phone of Devin Patrick Kelley"

So what? There is no evidence on the phone need for his prosecution.
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I imagine there is some relevant information they could glean from it, but at the end of the day, it's just another lame excuse.
 
nysmo said:
What about a hummer with a .50 cal belt fed machine gun? The gov't has those. Can I have one? Or how about a Javelin rocket launcher, those are pretty cool, I could see that being handy during an oppressive gov't take over. I'm obtaining my pilots license right now, can I attach a 5 barrel gatling gun to it though? Those seem to work well on our oppressive gov't airplanes. What about nukes. The gov't as nukes. Can I have a nuke?
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The oppressiveness of government is proportionally relative to the level of resistance the population can return.

"The US government will bomb you if we let you have guns" is not a rational argument. The US government will not bomb the US population. They might instruct soldiers to pull you from you home, in which case an armed populace would be able to resist. An armed populace does restrict the oppressive nature of centralized authority. It is a fact.
 
Meeho said:
If a manufacturer can unlock it that it is not a working encryption. They should absolutely not have the ability to do so, court order or not.
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If a manufacturer can unlock it, that means that anyone can and it's just a false sense of security.
 
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Lenard said:
The oppressiveness of government is proportionally relative to the level of resistance the population can return.

"The US government will bomb you if we let you have guns" is not a rational argument. The US government will not bomb the US population. They might instruct soldiers to pull you from you home, in which case an armed populace would be able to resist. An armed populace does restrict the oppressive nature of centralized authority. It is a fact.
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So if there was a hotel with 100 vegas style shooters holed up firing from all directions you dont think the military would deploy whatever assets necessary to neutralize the situation?

But you didnt answer my question and you attributed a quote i never made. Can I have a turret mounted .50 cal machine gun on my truck? Why or why not?
 
The content on the phone could change his sentence from death penalty to life inprisonment. This is important business.
 
azuza001 said:
The question is what is on the phone, maybe a lead to something else? You don't know. If there was a safe in his home and you already know he did it you won't expect them to go "well, there may be more evidence in there showing someone else may be involved, but what difference does it make we got the shooter."

Thats what could be there. Maybe something, maybe nothing. But you don't know if you don't look and you already know he is guilty of quite a bit. This isn't "we think he committed a crime so we want access to his phone to prove it" it's "we know he did it, we want to know who else was he talking to and what they may have known and when"
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Is there any evidence of a conspiracy?
 
jpm100 said:
Is there any evidence of a conspiracy?
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And therein lies the rub of the situation (and others like it) aka a Catch-22: you need evidence of something to prove a potential conspiracy exists but you can't find the evidence without looking for it.
 
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