Does the FBI Already Have Apple’s Source Code?

Great post over at Schneier on what is going on behind the scenes:

ZDNet has an article on US government pressure on software companies to hand over copies of their source code. There’s no details because no one is talking on the record, but I also believe that this is happening.

When asked, a spokesperson for the Justice Dept. acknowledged that the department has demanded source code and private encryption keys before.

These orders would probably come from the FISA Court:

These orders are so highly classified that simply acknowledging an order’s existence is illegal, even a company’s chief executive or members of the board may not be told. Only those who are necessary to execute the order would know, and would be subject to the same secrecy provisions.

How weird has the US gotten? I imagine that the way this system would work is Apple’s engineers have already all been clocked by surveillance, to the point they know who would have access to what they need within the company. Then, at a predetermined moment, (so as to maintain operational security) they either roll to the engineer’s house in the middle of the night and wake him up or grab him in a traffic stop in an isolated portion of his route. I’d imagine they take him to the local FBI office, lay the court orders on him, make him sign the secrecy agreements, and explain to him that the next day he will pull everything they need, and he can’t tell his boss, he can’t tell anyone, and he can’t get caught. Then he supplies them with the code, without anyone who doesn’t have to know finding out.

Now imagine being that engineer. You love your job, your boss is great, your coworkers like you, and your company trusts you enough to give you access to it’s deepest secrets. Suddenly you are in a government office with shadowy people who have probably erased their own names from the system, you are being told you will steal those secrets and give them to these nameless entities, you can’t tell anyone, and when you are done you will go on as if nothing happened. And if you don’t, or if you tell anyone, you go straight to federal prison, and nobody hears from you again.

Think that’s crazy? Check this:

The NSA’s catalog of implants and software backdoors suggest that some companies, including Dell, Huawei, and Juniper — which was publicly linked to an “unauthorized” backdoor — had their servers and firewall products targeted and attacked through various exploits. Other exploits were able to infiltrate firmware of hard drives manufactured by Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, and Samsung.

Last year, antivirus maker and security firm Kaspersky later found evidence that the NSA had obtained source code from a number of prominent hard drive makers — a claim the NSA denied — to quietly install software used to eavesdrop on the majority of the world’s computers.

So an engineer could have the exact same thing happen, only instead of pulling sensitive code, he is inserting a backdoor in the code, unbeknown to his bosses.

If a foreign company used blackmail in this fashion to coerce an employee I’d be horrified. Even legitimate Law Enforcement using this is very disconcerting. However the fact this force of government could be used by Hillary Clinton’s machine, should she get into office, is absolutely shocking. We saw what happened with those FBI surveillance/intelligence files she got her hands on. She will exploit any government power she can get her hands on to attack anyone she can find who opposes her and her big government dreams. Given allegations about her tenure in the State Department, I’d even wonder if she would have malicious code inserted at one company for a competitor, in return for Clinton Foundation donations.

All of this also raises the question, why the public Kabuki theater with Apple? Either Apple is a thoroughly and uniformly compromised platform they want to move everyone who values privacy to (unlike the more variable Android systems), or Apple’s counter-intel ops are so intensive the spooks can’t get at engineers unseen because Apple itself has all its own engineers with sensitive access under 24/7 coverage, or this is theater designed to misdirect Tim Cook from the fact they have already compromised the iPhone, or they just want Apple’s engineers to do the coding, because they are better at it than the government spooks.

As one brilliant person said, we don’t have an encryption problem, we have a Muslim immigration problem. If we had kept Muslims out after 9/11, domestic terrorism would be much less of a problem, and the powers that be would have needed another excuse to insert government so deeply into every facet of everyone’s lives. Instead, we let the liberals both import an enemy they will try to use against us, and create a justification for an all powerful government which is forcing its way into all of our lives.

I barely recognize the country I grew up in anymore, and I doubt I know one tenth of what is going on. I am just amazed.