Comment on FBI Couldn’t Get into WaPo Reporter’s iPhone Because It Had Lockdown Mode Enabled

• Zamboni_Driver@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Any iPhone? Almost certainly.

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• floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Virtually any phone I would say, yeah. Either by rubberhose cryptanalysis or by sheer time, money, and tools, they most likely can.

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  • dev_null@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    So “any phone” turned into “virtually any phone”, and the owner needs to be alive and apprehended, and then they “most likely” can, maybe.

    See, I mostly agree with what you said. But you can see how we have moved the goalpoast away from “there is no phone the government cannot get into”, to “the government can get into most phones”, which is quite a different statement.

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    • floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I am not moving goalposts or making different statements, I’m not the user you were replying to.

      I also mostly agree with you, but my angle is that the difference between “the government can get into virtually any phone” and “the government can get into most phones” is that the latter makes it seem like you can be “smart/knowledgeable enough” to avoid that, and that’s untrue. You should assume everything you keep on your phone can be extracted because of the nature of smartphone manufacturers, the supply chain etc, but I do not believe no phone can’t be broken into like OP was saying.

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      • dev_null@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        I get what you are saying but I’m seeing this from a different perspective.

        The first statement is saying “there is nothing you can do”. You shouldn’t care about your privacy, you shouldn’t try to be careful, you shouldn’t fight for yourself. The government is all powerful and you should accept your fate. That’s why I don’t like these sweeping absolute statements. They promote giving up.

        The other is “this is hard, but it’s possible to win”. And sure, you probably won’t win if the government is specifically targeting you and sending agents with rubber hoses against you. But in all likelihood they aren’t. And there are many things you can do to prevent actual passive surveillance affecting you.

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