Galt's Gulch

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  • Posted by $ allosaur 8 years ago
    Why should the FBI care what they spend?
    It is only our tax money that's always blown for this and that and whatever.
    And should the elite geniuses who lead us need a few trillion more?
    Roll the presses!
    What, me worry? Joe Biden once said that spending will reduce the national debt.
    We are in good hands. Big Brother is there.
    And he may leave at any time with my blessings.
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  • Posted by freedomforall 8 years ago
    What do you expect from a bureau that should have ended with prohibition. Their primary jobs have always been to steal money from honest people and protect the banksters from theft.
    They have not accomplished anything in 108 years of existence. Thanks again to the GD Roosevelts!
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  • Posted by Esceptico 8 years ago
    In congress, $1 million is called "a buck." i think they should have paid more and increased their budget (joke -- for those who do not appreciate irony).
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  • Posted by $ Radio_Randy 8 years ago
    The interesting part, to me (and no surprise), was that they didn't get anything of real value from the phone. I think I mentioned, previously, that they should have made a Geraldo Rivera show out of it. The results would have been about the same.
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  • Posted by Herb7734 8 years ago
    I know a software engineer (my son) who could have done it for the price of a nice new SUV for his old man. But, you know the government. They're not happy unless they're spending $5,000 for an $8.95 wrench.
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  • Posted by $ Thoritsu 8 years ago
    $1M is trivial if the alternative was a precedent for the government to be able to violate the 3rd Amendment for corporations!

    Would love to see someone write a FOIA for the data on the phone!
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  • Posted by CircuitGuy 8 years ago
    A software engineer who I think is brilliant told me he thought the gov't's position sounded like a ploy to get a legal precedent or something b/c the technical issues, he said, are not that hard. And if we could do it, he figured, the FBI certainly could. I bet he was wrong about that. If he had contacted the right person at the FBI, we probably could have sold them the procedure.
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    • Posted by ewv 8 years ago
      He was right that it was a backdoor attempt to establish a precedent to get an Apple-supplied general back door. But other reports indicate that the 'tool' was hardware, not just software. They needed a way to tamper with the device that would not set off the self-destruct mechanism for the data. (The equivalent of "I swear by ...") Other articles reported in more detail the belief that they made a copy of the data from the hardware and worked with that or used it to replace the original if something went wrong. The original problem was described as trying to brute force an encrypted password that if tried too any times would destroy the protected data.
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      • Posted by CircuitGuy 8 years ago
        "He was right that it was a backdoor attempt to establish a precedent to get an Apple-supplied general back door."
        I'm not surprised. I don't mind them breaking down the door if they have a warrant to investigate a serious crime. I don't want them to have a universal key they can use whenever they want.

        "But other reports indicate that the 'tool' was hardware, not just software. They needed a way to tamper with the device that would not set off the self-destruct mechanism for the data. "
        Yes. I'm a hardware engineering, and he's a software engineer. Our idea involved both. Like most projects, it would have been at least three times harder than we imagined it at the outset.
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  • Posted by roneida 8 years ago
    How ignorant and heavy handed. I can't speak for Apple, but I would bet that if any of the commissars in our justice had the dignity and demeanor to ASK Apple to help them off the record and secretly Apple, or any other big American company, would have joyfully and eagerly done it. But, NO, with this combative eager beaver "sue them" amateur in our White house, everything has to be demanded by some illegal executive order BS. What a disaster this guy is. DON'T forget to vote. it may be the last election you are permitted to.
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