Follow the money: Apple vs. the FBI

[EMJ]

By Charlie Stross
"Here's my theory: Apple see their long term future as including a global secure payments infrastructure that takes over the role of Visa and Mastercard's networks—and ultimately of spawning a retail banking subsidiary to provide financial services directly, backed by some of their cash stockpile.

The FBI thought they were asking for a way to unlock a mobile phone, because the FBI is myopically focussed on past criminal investigations, not the future of the technology industry, and the FBI did not understand that they were actually asking for a way to tracelessly unlock and mess with every ATM and credit card on the planet circa 2030 (if not via Apple, then via the other phone OSs, once the festering security fleapit that is Android wakes up and smells the money).

If the FBI get what they want, then the back door will be installed and the next-generation payments infrastructure will be just as prone to fraud as the last-generation card infrastructure, with its card skimmers and identity theft.

And this is why Tim Cook is willing to go to the mattresses with the US department of justice over iOS security: if nobody trusts their iPhone, nobody will be willing to trust the next-generation Apple Bank, and Apple is going to lose their best option for securing their cash pile as it climbs towards the stratosphere."

[vexed87]

I'm sure their current products would suffer too, I wouldn't touch smart phone technology with a barge pole if I had reason to believe that my every move was being tracked, logged or accessible at any time.

[Chad]

The FBI thought they were asking for a way to unlock a mobile phone, because the FBI is myopically focussed on past criminal investigations, not the future of the technology industry, and the FBI did not understand that they were actually asking for a way to tracelessly unlock and mess with every ATM and credit card on the planet circa 2030 (if not via Apple, then via the other phone OSs, once the festering security fleapit that is Android wakes up and smells the money).

Apple is definitely very interested in electronic transactions. They are moving in on PayPal this year.

http://recode.net/2016/03/23/apple-pay- ... ng-season/

[GandK]

Yes.

[bryan]

Kind of like government having some control over some Certificate Authorities or vendors with capability to install a root certificate in the devices they make?

[jacob]

Yeah, this reminds me of the US attempts to classify encryption during the 1990s. The result was that the US had poor encryption domestically whereas the rest of the world moved onto harder encryption. After it was demonstrated that even grad students (google DES 56) could crack the US government mandated security restrictions on banking transactions in the the US, some laws were finally changed ...

Now the real question is ... given that FBI apparently managed to crack the iPhone with the help of some Israeli security company, what's Tim Cook's resistance actually worth now? (I mean $$$ not morally.) This suggests to me that 1) The FBI didn't want to pay for the grad student expertise required to fix this problem until they had to. 2) Apple didn't want to pay for software engineers to fix the problem once every government in the world wants tech support for their own terrorist attacks. Imagine the precedent of saying yes once! It would be an ongoing fire alert!

Obviously, Apple needs to step it up if they want to stay in the game of secure transactions. Otherwise we might as well resort to Androids or open postcards for financial and medical transactions.

PS: I note that Apple's stock price didn't respond much to the hack => Clearly most people---not surprisingly BTW---don't really care about transaction security at this point. This is confirmed by other vectors. Humans generally don't care one iota about security until TSHTF on their personal accounts.

[vexed87]

Now the real question is ... given that FBI apparently managed to crack the iPhone with the help of some Israeli security company, what's Tim Cook's resistance actually worth now? (I mean $$$ not morally.)

When I heard about Tim's stance, it almost made me want an iPhone. I almost started to believe Apple might have my back when it comes to security, then I realised how expensive the handsets are, and seemingly not much more secure than budget android devices.

It benefits Apple massively to be portrayed as benevolent tech company in the press. Techie consumers love that stuff.