March 31, 2016

Ignorance is Bliss in Apple-FBI Case

You know that old adage: Ignorance is bliss. Ahhh... wouldn't that be nice?

My two stances:

  1. We should assume our data is never safe.
  2. Hack away as long as I don't know about it.

Stance 1

If you don't assume, or haven't planned for what would happen if you were hacked, then you won't have a proper response. What numbers are you going to call? What passwords are you going to change? How do you protect yourself in the aftermath? It's better to assume that a hack is inevitable so that you can avoid as much fallout as possible.

If you do want to be more security conscious, how would you go about doing it? In order of most secure to least secure (and hardest to easiest):

  1. Don't write down or create whatever is that someone would want to snoop in the first place.
  2. If you must write it down or create it, try to accomplish it offline whether that be pen and paper (but then you have other physical-world attack vectors) or use an offline "air gapped computer" (although... maybe those aren't as safe as once thought).
  3. Okay, okay... if those aren't possible, I guess you could rely on some of the more secure services to protect yourself, such as VPNs, secure cloud services, a password manager and multiple, long, complicated passwords for your accounts.

Stance 2

I truly, honestly don't care if the FBI has a way to get into my phone as long as the phone manufacturer isn't giving them access on purpose (e.g. a backdoor). Before this whole case, I assumed they could theoretically get whatever they wanted with the NSA's help. I mean, we also live in the age of incessant sharing, so chances are whatever you want to keep secret is already out there.

While I encourage the FBI, NSA, and any other acronym'ed agency to work within their charters to keep us safe, I also feel that Apple, and other manufacturers, should be doing everything they can to patch security holes and generally protect me as the consumer. It's just good business. Plus, who doesn't like someone covering his or her back?

I realize that sets us up for a classic cat-and-mouse game. That's okay though! If Apple were to become complacent with the state of their security software and hardware development, then giant security holes would persist longer and become more widely known. We'd end up more vulnerable. Likewise, if hackers and agencies weren't constantly trying to find ways past the security, then the gaps might go unnoticed until a seriously nefarious party discovers and exploits them. In other words, the goal should be to work toward more and more secure software and hardware, which explicitly excludes direct access through backdoors.