iPhone Encryption and the Return of the Crypto Wars by Bruce Schneier
Last week, Apple announced that it is closing a serious security vulnerability in the iPhone. It used to be that the phone's encryption only protected a small amount of the data, and Apple had the ability to bypass security on the rest of it.
From now on, all the phone's data is protected. It can no longer be accessed by criminals, governments, or rogue employees. Access to it can no longer be demanded by totalitarian governments. A user's iPhone data is now more secure.
To hear US law enforcement respond, you'd think Apple's move heralded an unstoppable crime wave. See, the FBI had been using that vulnerability to get into people's iPhones. In the words of cyberlaw professor Orin Kerr, "How is the public interest served by a policy that only thwarts lawful search warrants?"
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This is why the FBI's scare stories tend to wither after public scrutiny. A former FBI assistant director wrote about a kidnapped man who would never have been found without the ability of the FBI to decrypt an iPhone, only to retract the point hours later because it wasn't true.
We've seen this game before. During the crypto wars of the 1990s, FBI Director Louis Freeh and others would repeatedly use the example of mobster John Gotti to illustrate why the ability to tap telephones was so vital. But the Gotti evidence was collected using a room bug, not a telephone tap. And those same scary criminal tropes were trotted out then, too. Back then we called them the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: pedophiles, kidnappers, drug dealers, and terrorists. Nothing has changed.