Christmas is approaching, and billions of mobile phones will be given away. To get their share of this gigantic pie, every mobile phone brand does nothing but excite their users. If Apple users already get excited about a great innovation like “The Purple Icon”, you understand that something as serious as “privacy” will send them into ecstasy.
However, like all the ecstasy of Apple users, it will be a bogus ecstasy, an ecstasy that smacks of stupidity and gullibility, or rather of religion, which is the sum of the two.
Thus comes a new quarrel with the FBI. According to the media, Apple introduces new technologies for privacy, and the FBI fears it. And this is corroborated, according to the narrative, by the fact that there was another "clash" with Apple a few years ago.
It is always difficult to explain to them that the FBI won the last "fight" with the FBI, by paying an Israeli security company to unlock the cell phone. After all, one thing must be said: the last time my daughter was cut off from her cell phone (but it was Samsung) a trip to the Chinese repair shop was enough.
They also fix apples, for the record.
But it goes deeper than that.
Suppose a car salesman, say NSU, advertises his new car, say Prinz, because if you buy that car you don't pay excise taxes on fuel. And that this happens in Northern Italy, because they want the most Northern League and Po Valley customers.
You know it's not legal. So, you know that's not going to happen. You know that if any technology REALLY could do that, the state would ban it. And it would arrest the leaders of NSU.
On the other hand, surely after that publicity we would know that the GdF has become angry and that there will be a clash over the payment of excise duties.
And that's because the law is the law.
This lie would have longer legs if it were smarter: “in case your partner cheats on you, this car will go off the road while your partner is driving it”. This is more difficult to ascertain, because nobody likes to talk about having horns. But if you buy one for that reason, your partner will probably be as pissed as the FBI.
And that's what Apple does. He tells you that the phone guarantees your privacy, he tells you that for this reason the FBI is pissed (I see them very relaxed, however), he says that they have been pissed in the past (actually they unlocked the cell phone in a month), and all they think that THEN the cell phone looks after their privacy.
In reality, almost all techniques for breaking privacy are based on crossing metadata and on Granger's causality, which becomes much stronger when there is a lot of data.
In short, this happens:
But if we look at the claim, we discover one thing: the American LAW REQUIRES every provider to have to give access to the state, if it requests to observe the communications of any citizen.
Prohibition that also extends outside the USA, and which produces a dispute with the EU.
Suddenly Apple arrives and says “but no, buy MY cell phone, so not even the FBI can listen to you”. Aha.
The Apple user is willing to believe that Apple is committing a federal crime against antiterrorism laws, simply because the press (which happens to advertise Apple as Native Advertising) tells him that the FBI is not happy with this technology.
To say I'm a bunch of idiots is an understatement. But Christmas is coming, so I'm good.
I am sorry. It is a US state law. Apple CANNOT build a cell phone that stands up to FBI investigation, especially KNOWING IT WILL, without committing a very serious felony.
If Apple makes a system secure but accessible to the FBI, and then the access fails unintentionally, US law could say it failed unintentionally and Apple is not responsible.
But if the system is DESIGNED and ADVERTISED as one that WILL DEFINITELY resist FBI forensic techniques, Tim Cook would go to jail, just like the CEO of a company that makes "Cash Registers That Don't Charge You Taxes." No, you can't. It's against the law.
And therefore the advertising (native or otherwise) that claims the opposite is a lie.
The absurd thing is that they don't believe it either.
In the run-up to Christmas and Black Friday, all the papers have the usual tall tale that Apple is so confident that not even the FBI can get into it with a physical inspection.
But the same press will spend the rest of the year feeling indignant because the new law allows the indiscriminate use of Trojans and Malware. If you really thought that what Apple says, ie that cellphone security is implemented in silicon at the ion implantation level, Malware and Trojans shouldn't even be on the horizon of your concerns.
You can't sell that a cell phone is susceptible to remote attacks, and then say that the cell phone is resistant even to physical inspection. Is absurd.
Consequently, I deny the good faith of these journalists: they don't believe it either.
Having said that, why am I talking about (s)privacy?
I talk about it because IT security personnel know that
a false sense of security is a security problem.
It means that if the person buys a 100 euro Chinese carcass, he probably won't put his life's secrets on it. If a person KNOWS that their cell phone is insecure, they probably DON'T use it that way.
BUT if a person believes they have such a data vault that they can even resist the FBI, then they might think about leaving secret stuff in there.
Twenty years ago I had a helpdesk. The vast majority of users who had "secret" things kept them in a mcafee-encrypted folder. The same company produced the data recovery tool, the backup tool, and the data migration tool. Aha.
Inside a company computer, I found a folder called “Nero”.
Now, do you think someone would leave evidence of a tax crime on a computer if they weren't convinced that by encrypting with McAfee they would be secret?
This is why it is an advertisement that not only does not improve the security of the average user, but worsens it: the average user is invited to leave on an apple mobile phone (or on the apple cloud, this time) its data “E2E encrypted”, thinking that not even the FBI could get into it, when by law Apple is obliged to let the FBI read the data.
The chickens will leave vital data in Apple's cloud, data they may not have left if they hadn't read these tall tales.
Who knows how sorry the FBI will be.
