Same article on the FT:<p><a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/af23e3ea-07f1-11e6-b6d3-746f8e9cdd33.html#axzz46UpvC84n" rel="nofollow">http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/af23e3ea-07f1-11e6-b6d3-746f8e9cdd...</a><p>James Comey, director of the FBI, said on Thursday that the cost was “worth it”, but added that an accommodation needed to be made with Apple and other technology companies in the future, as paying outside technologists to find ways to access highly-encrypted messages on phones used by terrorist suspects was not “scalable.”
I wish people who paid lots of government money for things were always forced to do so out of their salary. For example: we will pay you $X per year in exchange for giving you the responsibility to make up to 10 big purchases; each <i>time</i> you purchase however, 1% of the proposed sum comes out of that $X salary; now then, how judicious will you be?<p>One thing Ron Paul did in Congress years ago, after one of those stupid “let’s spend taxpayer money on a bunch of medals” proposals or something, was to rephrase that expense: he challenged Congress to simply donate a percentage of their own salaries to make it happen. After all, if it was so wonderful (echoing all the things other Congress members had stood up and said about the idea before then), and so worthwhile, surely they would <i>personally</i> not mind chipping in something, right? Predictably, a very small number of congresspeople were suddenly willing to go quite that far.
To me this raises a question about selling security vulnerabilities to state actors in general (in the context of the Facebook vulnerability thread where the standard discussion about value is being hashed out).<p>Specifically, I live in the UK and one of the complaints law enforcement has is that US companies can (and do) totally ignore valid court orders because they don't apply in the US (reddit being an arbitrary concrete example).<p>So, what would be the impact of GCHQ setting up a scheme where you can sell vulnerabilities to them (assuming they do the legwork to make it legal)? Would it violate some kind of trade agreement? I assume at minimum it would harm diplomatic relations given the pressure the big companies would exert on the US to push back.
Given that they found no relevant information on his work phone, exactly as experts and reasonable amateurs and common men predicted, how was it "worth it" as he claims? Is it that wasting huge sums of taxpayer money while attacking civil rights and attempting to instantiate a police surveillance state with no privacy is simply "worth it" no matter what, even if pointless?
I find it interesting that this entire issue is the same as the nuclear issue was in the cold war.<p>Government Technocrats: We need bigger and more powerful warheads to protect us from the Soviets.<p>General Public: OK we'll learn Duck and Cover.<p>Sensible Few: Is risking the destruction of everything we're trying to protect worth it?<p>Government Technocrats: We can't look our children in the eye ... yadda yadda yadda.
I'm trying to see what's around the corner for this argument.<p>Sure they can go to congress and push for increased funding or whatever for their top cases. Which gives congress a tangible budget number that could be "saved" by passing a law, but politics/congress doesn't really work this way - spending money <i>benefits</i> the administrating critters, the FBI, and the contractors doing the work.<p>Furthermore, $1M is essentially a small amount and obviously "worth it" for the major sensational events that they'd use to push through backdoors. So it seems they're actually giving up ground by having to move the argument to the urgency for backdoors in cases that <i>aren't</i> worth $1M.<p>I can see the argument playing for fiscal-primacy authoritarians who would take this as an example of government waste, but they'd already support government backdoors and I don't see this riling them up enough to be worth it.<p>It seems like a dead-end for propaganda purposes. What am I missing?<p>Maybe they're just trying to salt the earth so that their technical success in this case does not hinder them arguing for backdoors <i>next</i> time?
To me this sounds like the typical "teachers and firefighters" government PR tactic. The best response is an equally ridiculous knee-jerk public reaction. We need to call to defund the FBI by 1 million dollars to settle the accounting. Clearly they have too much money burning holes in their pockets if they are able to make large purchases of this nature.
Paywalled for me here in the UK. I assume the title sums up the article?<p>Since I can't read the article, from anyone that can, how did they come to that figure? Is that just the cost of the exploit or..?<p>Cheers
What evidence is there that the phone was actually hacked? Wouldn't saying "ah never mind we hacked it" be a convenient way out of a precedent-setting court case the FBI was losing?
If you consider all of the time and effort that they put into this case, they spent a hell of a lot more than $1M. We're focusing so much on it because it a single line item.
Ugh - total paywall on the article.<p>Seriously, we need to just ban domains that do that (full paywall after 1st paragraph) - it's not really sharing any content with the community.
This is our tax money down the drain by scaring us to death for fear of non-existent terrorist threat. It is remarkable how such FBI directors don't get fired from their job.
What bothers me is they apparently had no better intel available to spend that money on. An iPhone really? This screams of the government having absolutely nothing to do if not being outright incompetent entirely.