What am I missing?

[Johan Wevers]

On 30-03-2016 20:08, Robert J. Hansen wrote:

> My position: "The FBI already had precedent on their side from clubbing
> other smaller companies, and they decided they finally had enough legal
> support to go after the big fish: Apple."

I didn't see this from the legal files, but did the FBI used these
precedents in court?

Further, a legal battle might be expensive but if you're a company over
a certain size it's all the same. There is not really an advantage of
having 10T$ instead of only 1T$ in your bank account.

> Do I think the FBI had plans for how to capitalize on a court victory?
> Sure.  But this particular idea, that the FBI wanted to get precedent on
> their side to go after smaller players next, is ... it's crazy talk.

OK, perhaps going after others was not their main goal. However, using
this tool to crack other iPhones was surely on their wish list.

> The Middle East in particular is full of small, weird mobile phone
> manufacturers.  Looking over my notes of mobile manufacturers I've
> worked with and starting at the top, there's Alcatel.  Lot of Motorola,
> lot of Samsung, and at the end there's ZTE.

But how well are they protected? Android disk encryption uses (by
default) the key you use to unlock the screen, which is probably easy in
most cases.

BTW, "Johann" with 2 n's is the German spelling. In Dutch it's only 1 n
at the end.

-- 
ir. J.C.A. Wevers
PGP/GPG public keys at http://www.xs4all.nl/~johanw/pgpkeys.html