9 ms·

FBI Paid More Than $1M to Hack San Bernardino iPhone

316 points by maibaum 10y ago

oneloop 10y ago
Same article on the FT: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/af23e3ea-07f1-11e6-b6d3-746f8e9cdd33.html#axzz46UpvC84n http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/af23e3ea-07f1-11e6-b6d3-746f8e9cdd... 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.”
- RIMR 10y ago
  >paying outside technologists to find ways to access highly-encrypted messages on phones used by terrorist suspects was not “scalable.” Good! I don't want it to be "scalable". That means they want to expand the data that they are collecting to include more a more phones. There is no need to do that!
  - dclowd9901 10y ago
    Yeah. I thought the whole point of court ordered warrants was to NOT be scalable, cause, you know, due process or whatever.
- fweespee_ch 10y ago
  > 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.” That is exactly what we want. If its clearly in the public interest to expended substantial effort as part of a criminal investigation, they absolutely should do so. The problem is they want scalable access to everything.
  - newjersey 10y ago
    Was there something on the phone what made it worth it? I don't know if I understand the hypocrisy of hn. We cry "oh humanity" when Ford pays $50k over sticker for a new Tesla car for reverse engineering but of course if the FBI does something then surely they were judicious with their purse strings. Surely.
    - fweespee_ch 10y ago
      > Was there something on the phone what made it worth it? It doesn't matter to me tbh. They want to investigate, they can. I just don't want them to be able to "scale" their investigations like they seem to want so they can get into all encrypted communications without a serious financial hurdle because they'll abuse it. > I don't know if I understand the hypocrisy of hn. We cry "oh humanity" when Ford pays $50k over sticker for a new Tesla car for reverse engineering but of course if the FBI does something then surely they were judicious with their purse strings. I didn't. Generalizing like that is unhealthy because it causes you to make some silly assumptions.
- MichaelGG 10y ago
  At what scale are they accessing the hardware of terrorists anyways?
- Negative1 10y ago
  The only reason it would be 'Worth it' is if they found something of note (something to help prosecution of other criminals or prevent further attacks). Is there any reason to believe that this hack accomplished this? What else would make it 'worth it'? Or is this just politicking?
  - CHaro 10y ago
    It's just politicking, its "worth it" because they get to flex their muscle and show the world that they don't need apple's cooperation to get what they want.
    - lisper 10y ago
      And because it wasn't their own money.
      - EdHominem 10y ago
        That's an important point. They're paid our money, to plot ways to spend more of our money on marketing and lawyers, to misinform us.
    - colejohnson66 10y ago
      And because they didn't get to see their precious All Wits Act request struck down setting a precedent against them. A few million to be able to keep invoking the AWA would definitely be "worth it" in their eyes.
  - euyyn 10y ago
    > Is there any reason to believe that this hack accomplished this? You mean besides the fact that the FBI guy said it was worth it? You don't expect them to publish the intel they got from the phone before being able to act on it, no?
  - adrr 10y ago
    I doubt it was worth it. It wasn't even the terrorist's phone. It was owned by their employer. The terrorists destroyed their personal phones prior to attack.
- isleyaardvark 10y ago
  > was not “scalable.” This is the same James Comey that said they just were just asking Apple for access to just that one phone.
  - and-can 10y ago
    “The relief we seek is limited and its value increasingly obsolete because the technology continues to evolve. We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist’s passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a decade to guess correctly. That’s it. “We don’t want to break anyone’s encryption or set a master key loose on the land,” Comey continued. “I hope thoughtful people will take the time to understand that. Maybe the phone holds the clue to finding more terrorists. Maybe it doesn’t. But we can’t look the survivors in the eye, or ourselves in the mirror, if we don’t follow this lead. “
    - vitd 10y ago
      That's a lot of double-speak. They know that removing the timeout so they can try thousands of passwords per second opens up a huge security hole. What he's saying is "we want it both ways". We don't want to take away security for users, we just want to make it easier for someone who's not the owner of the phone to get into it.
      - ikeboy 10y ago
        The government owned the iPhone in question.
        rubyfan 10y ago
        "The government" is not one organization.
        ikeboy 10y ago
        That doesn't seem relevant unless there's a dispute over ownership, which there isn't.
- moomin 10y ago
  It was worth it to get out of a court case they were obviously losing that would establish precedent.
  - gscott 10y ago
    Since they have other similar cases with more friendly judges to the FBI desires.
- mwfunk 10y ago
  I see two ways to interpret what he said, and I'm kind of appalled at both interpretations: (1) "We can't afford to pay someone every time we need to bypass security, therefore we need the ability to force third parties to do this work for free": um, OK. -or- (2) "Bypassing security takes too much time and effort, therefore we need a backdoor": even more horrifying, even though he's repeatedly denied that this is the endgame. Edit: typo
  - orky56 10y ago
    He doesn't want a "backdoor" just special treatment time and again.
    - EdHominem 10y ago
      It's not an either-or. They want the backdoor so they don't have to ask, and they want a new backdoor created anytime they ask.
- Joof 10y ago
  Making it not scalable is the point. It places a monetary restriction so that they have to pick and choose what devices they think are worth hacking and which ones are not. This is the balance between citizen's rights and government power. Otherwise we just collect everyone's data on everything all the time and have access to everything.
  - djrogers 10y ago
    Why would you expect them to be responsible with money that isn't theirs? Your argument would work for an individual, and to a lesser extent a corporation (where money spent comes out of profit and would be balanced against benefit), but the government plays with your money - not their own. If they want to get into a hundred phones, they'll just ask congress for an appropriation for $100m. And since the government is one of its own largest lobbyists, it'll happen.
    - Joof 10y ago
      They don't have unlimited money. If they can bring it down to $1000 per phone to crack, they still can't crack millions of phones without wondering why their budget is allocated this way.
- hardwaresofton 10y ago
  Along what dimension is this "not scalable"? If you have 100 iPhoneCs and the exploit works on all of them, it sounds like it's very scalable to me. It doesn't scale across every iphone ever made (or that will be made), but honestly, with a few tweaks (maybe a forced OS downgrade, whatever), it could be made to be. Also, if you don't release the attack vector, things get even murkier. Plus, the government happens to be the entity that prints our money, as well as an entity that is essentially limitless in funds because it extracts it's budget from US. Competition from firms may keep the price of breaking the iphone down, well within what the government can pay without anyone noticing (once this dies down). Nevermind companies that would LOVE to sell the NSA a single iphone exploit for anywhere close to $1M.
  - reynoldsbd 10y ago
    I think he meant "scalable" in terms of the amount of money, time and effort it will take to overcome each subsequent security obstacle faced by law enforcement. In that sense, this whole Apple-FBI fiasco was certainly not scalable. Also, money is a very real limiting factor. The government can't just print more money to solve its problems.
    - vectored 10y ago
      Could you explain that, please? I had understood that the 3 rounds of QE essentially achieved this?
- zanny 10y ago
  Can I live in a country that doesn't think a million dollars to break encryption on one phone is worth it? I value my tax dollar way more than they seem to, and way more than 50 thousand dollar air conditioners for jet fighters.
  - bendykstra 10y ago
    Air conditioning in most jet fighters is a necessity in order to keep the avionics cool.
- ipsin 10y ago
  Was it "worth it" because they dodged the potential for setting a precedent that limited the FBI's power? It doesn't seem like it was "worth it" because they found useful evidence on the phone.
- stephengillie 10y ago
  This also has a paywall. Is there a non-paywalled version of this story, or will this story remain irrelevant to my life forever? (If it were relevant to myself and others, someone would create a non-paywalled version of the story, maybe so simply as just retyping here what they've read elsewhere. Humans see censorship, paywalls, etc as damage and route around them, as long as positive value is generated.)
- mtgx 10y ago
  That's why you're supposed to use law enforcement resources where you know it makes a difference. The FBI made this whole circus around this phone when everyone already knew they wouldn't found anything. But worst of all, they didn't even bother to check the metadata for that phone, which would've also confirmed whether the phone was used to set-up crimes or not. It was all a ruse to get their precedent for backdoors, and now they're dripping this (probably bullshit) story to the media in a way that further progresses their agenda, after classifying the information in the first place.
- ascotan 10y ago
  Not scalable as in 'we can't spend a year breaking into every version of OSX', not 'we can't spend a million dollars breaking into every version of OSX'. Because a million bucks is chump change in government spending.
- _pmf_ 10y ago
  > as paying outside technologists to find ways to access highly-encrypted messages on phones used by terrorist suspects was not “scalable.” It would be fucking hilarious if he used this kind of language to mock the SV lingo.
tomtoise 10y ago
Paywalled for me here in the UK. I assume the title sums up the article? 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..? Cheers
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  > The Federal Bureau of Investigation paid more than $1 million for a hacking tool that opened the iPhone of a terrorist gunman in San Bernardino, Calif., the head of the agency said Thursday. > Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum in London, FBI Director James Comey didn’t cite a precise figure for how much the government paid for the solution to cracking the phone but said it was more than his salary for the seven-plus years remaining in his term at the FBI. > His annual salary is about $180,000 a year, so that comes to $1.26 million or more. > “[We] paid a lot’’ for the hacking tool, Mr. Comey said. “But it was worth it.’’ I wonder how exactly it's worth it, given that nothing of interest of relevance was found on the device.
  - losteric 10y ago
    Well now they have a tool they can use at any time.
    - tomtoise 10y ago
      I was just thinking this. Again, I haven't been able to read the article but I was under the impression that the FBI paid to crack this one phone, I didn't realize that they have this tool that could 'hack' more iPhones with.
    - LeifCarrotson 10y ago
      On iPhone 5. Until Apple updates the software to fix the vulnerability.
      - imaginenore 10y ago
        If they know what to fix. FBI aren't idiots to tell them.
Shicholas 10y ago
Next time they should just bring the phone to RSA and have their pick of vendor-booth-magician to decrypt it.
readams 10y ago
No paywall link: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-paid-more-than-1-million-for-san-bernardino-iphone-hack-james-comey/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-paid-more-than-1-million-for...
Aelinsaar 10y ago
This really seems like a terrible market for a state to be so openly involved in.
- joeld42 10y ago
  So they should be clandestinely involved, instead? They're going to do it anyways, I'd rather know about it.
  - Aelinsaar 10y ago
    False dichotomy is false. They didn't have to do this, and by all accounts, received nothing of value for the money.
    - jsprogrammer 10y ago
      Don't they have a tool to get into other iPhone's now? $1,000,000 doesn't seem too bad.
      - carlosdp 10y ago
        Not necessarily, they might not own the tool, just paid for someone to use it on the phone.
        jsprogrammer 10y ago
        The subtitle quote indicates that the tool was bought outright.
      - orky56 10y ago
        You can't put a price on national security. Never mind, they just did and they got to define national security as well.
      - Absentinsomniac 10y ago
        AFAIK, the exploit only works on older iphones. It'll quickly lose value going forward.
agsimeonov 10y ago
Were they going to pay Apple if they had somehow forced them to do the deed?
- danielweber 10y ago
  Yes.
- belltaco 10y ago
  Example: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/verizon-att-get-most-bucks-from-feds-for-wiretaps/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/verizon-att-get-most-bucks-from-... >AT&T, for example, imposes a $325 "activation fee" for each wiretap and $10 a day to maintain it. Smaller carriers Cricket and U.S. Cellular charge only about $250 per wiretap. But snoop on a Verizon customer? That costs the government $775 for the first month and $500 each month after that, according to industry disclosures made last year to Congressman Edward Markey. >And while Microsoft, Yahoo and Google won't say how much they charge, the American Civil Liberties Union found that email records can be turned over for as little as $25.
  - coldcode 10y ago
    So the only argument the FBI hears is how much? Disgusting.
    - discreditable 10y ago
      An argument you could make is that by associating a cost with wiretapping it discourages frivolous usage.
      - kabdib 10y ago
        Since when did the FBI care about spending money that they get from taxpayers?
aidanhs 10y ago
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). 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). 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.
- tantalor 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treason https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treason
- fweespee_ch 10y ago
  https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/06/damn-equities-sell-your-zero-days-navy https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/06/damn-equities-sell-you... > Noted eagle eye and EFF Investigative Researcher Dave Maass happened on an interesting item from earlier this week on FedBizOpps, the site for government agencies to post contracting opportunities. The Navy put up a solicitation explaining that the government wants “access to vulnerability intelligence, exploit reports and operational exploit binaries affecting widely used and relied upon commercial software,” including Microsoft, Adobe, Android, Apple, “and all others.” If that weren’t clear enough, the solicitation explains that “the vendor shall provide the government with a proposed list of available vulnerabilities, 0-day or N-day (no older than 6 months old). . . .The government will select from the supplied list and direct development of exploit binaries.” http://www.zdnet.com/article/nsa-purchased-zero-day-exploits-from-french-security-firm-vupen/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/nsa-purchased-zero-day-exploits... > The National Security Agency bought hacking tools from a security firm, based on documents unearthed by a FOI request. The US is doing it. The GCHQ likely does it too and I bet at least some of this list was built via information purchased from others: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/07/gchq_catalog_of.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/07/gchq_catalog_...
VT_Drew 10y ago
McAfee offered to do it free of charge. Should have took him up on that, rather than wast $1M.
- mtmail 10y ago
  McAfee's offer was a PR stunt. He admitted it a week later.
  - duskwuff 10y ago
    And he made a series of public statements which made it clear he had no understanding whatsoever of the technical issues involved. First, he claimed that he would use "social engineering" to access the phone's data. Later, he claimed that he could do it easily by clearing the area of flash memory containing the phone's password, apparently unaware of the fact that the password was used as a key to encrypt data. Source: http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/john-mcafee-better-prepare-to-eat-a-shoe-because-he-doesnt-know-how-iphones-work/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/john-mcafee-better-p...
    - HappyTypist 10y ago
      Social engineering could plausibly work against Apple employees.
      - djrogers 10y ago
        Which is undoubtedly one of the many reasons why  didn't want to create the software necessary to unlock the phone.
        serf 10y ago
        ot: it's oddly satisfying to me that the Apple unicode is broken for my browser.
refriedbeans3 10y ago
That's it?
- gist 10y ago
  a) The amount is nice since I think they apparently approached them after figuring out how to do this. So impossible to think anywhere near that amount of work was actually involved. b) Establish and prove they can do the job. Will get other work like this and be able to charge more. Really no different than what the local handyman or plumber does in some cases.
techterrier 10y ago
Is that it? Had they found a way to do it internally it could easily have cost 10x more.
- i_dunno 10y ago
  I agree.
- ascotan 10y ago
  5 people, 1 year = 1million. Likely a team of 4 devs and a PM. 10months to prototype, 2 months to clean up and release? Sounds reasonable.
pbreit 10y ago
Is that a lot or a little?
- LeifCarrotson 10y ago
  It's a lot if they want to hack millions of iPhones each year. As a one-off engineering project to break into an iPhone, it seems remarkably reasonable.
- potatohaven 10y ago
  It's about par. Some security firms will charge $1M/year and over. Corporate enterprises involved in intelligence gathering for the government (i.e. ATnT, Apple, Google, Microsoft, basically any "free" and paid tech service) can make a lot of money depending on how many accounts they pass off to the FBI,NSA, etc... If you're using any service in the US and the "West", even the "free speech" stuff like ytcombinator, reddit, they'll pass of information and can charge for it. edit: Apple's encryption fight, for example, is a bit of a wash. It's basically to lure in more users which they can charge more for. The more value the user has for their privacy, the more companies can charge for access. They are all corporate enterprises, and their responsibility is to profit for their shareholders. When the government offers a legal profitable offer, they have a responsibility to take it. If they are found not to take it, and a group or party finds out and can prove it was a profitable venture, they can attack the company with the courts.
  - matt4077 10y ago
    That's bullshit. Management has wide-ranging freedom to define what they see as the best course of action and nothing short of fraud is actionable in a court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule. In this case, the obvious defense would be that for a company such as Apple, the fees they charge the government for access are completely meaningless, compared to the damage the brand could suffer if they're found violating their user's privacy. At 25$ each as mentioned above, these fees probably don't even cover the costs of having a lawyer take a quick look at it.
ikeboy 10y ago
https://archive.is/OfqcJ https://archive.is/OfqcJ
kureikain 10y ago
Where did that $1M come from? If it's from tax I'll say that a big waste.
- beamatronic 10y ago
  Don't worry, it came from the Federal Reserve's printing press
- ProAm 10y ago
  Where else does it come from?
  - thisisdave 10y ago
    legalized theft [0] [0]: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512253265073870 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240531119034809045765122...
  - djrogers 10y ago
    We financed it - your kids will be paying for it.
- amalcon 10y ago
  Why does the source of money change the efficiency of a given use?
nickbauman 10y ago
I find it interesting that this entire issue is the same as the nuclear issue was in the cold war. Government Technocrats: We need bigger and more powerful warheads to protect us from the Soviets. General Public: OK we'll learn Duck and Cover. Sensible Few: Is risking the destruction of everything we're trying to protect worth it? Government Technocrats: We can't look our children in the eye ... yadda yadda yadda.
epalm 10y ago
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?
- ikeboy 10y ago
  Except the other cases haven't been dropped, and this case was perhaps the one most sympathetic to the government (terror).
WalterBright 10y ago
I'm in the wrong profession!
amptorn 10y ago
I still don't believe they've actually hacked it. There's no evidence that they have.
godgod 10y ago
"$1M and all I got was this lousy t-shirt"
mindslight 10y ago
I'm trying to see what's around the corner for this argument. 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 benefits the administrating critters, the FBI, and the contractors doing the work. 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 aren't worth $1M. 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. It seems like a dead-end for propaganda purposes. What am I missing? Maybe they're just trying to salt the earth so that their technical success in this case does not hinder them arguing for backdoors next time?
droithomme 10y ago
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?
- cpncrunch 10y ago
  It was worth it because they didn't know that beforehand. Now the FBI are sure that the attackers weren't in contact with other ISIS members. The FBI thinks that information is worth the $1.2M+ they paid. How could they possibly have known that without unlocking the phone?
  - djrogers 10y ago
    > Now the FBI are sure that the attackers weren't in contact with other ISIS members. Umm, no - no they aren't. Not even close. The terrorists personal phones were destroyed before the FBI could recover them, this was just a 'work phone'. Don't you think it's likely that a) there is a reason they destroyed their personal phones, and b) if they were going to communicate with other actors they'd be more likely to use the phone that's completely under their control?
    - cpncrunch 10y ago
      Yes, you're right. I guess the FBI just confirmed that there was no info on the work phone, which seems a valid line of inquiry.
  - sailfast 10y ago
    Metadata?
  - EdHominem 10y ago
    On the work phone, sure. Yay. You do know that they destroyed their personal phones, right? And that it's been months now, wasted bickering with Apple even if there would have been any leads. > How could they possibly have known that without unlocking the phone? Smart money says they already unlocked it with an exploit and knew there was nothing, then played legal games with Apple until they started losing, and to exit gracefully they accepted the offer of one of the many firms begging to extract data from the phone for them. They have the NSA's phone number. They were playing helpless for a reason.
tn13 10y ago
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.
- cpncrunch 10y ago
  I'm not entirely sure how you can call 14 deaths "non-existent".
  - digler999 10y ago
    not sure how cracking encryption will "un-kill" even one of those people.
    - cpncrunch 10y ago
      Who said it will? It's to prevent it happening again.
      - digler999 10y ago
        I thought that's what all the illegal mass-surveillance was for ?
      - passwordreset 10y ago
        What? The government pwning some terrorists iPhone will prevent terrorist attacks from happening again? How? I'm completely gobsmacked at the line of reasoning here.
        function_seven 10y ago
        The reasoning is that there may be new information that helps identify conspirators or abettors. We all know the chances of finding smoking-gun type evidence on that phone was slim, but that doesn't mean you ignore possible leads when attempting to piece together how a crime was committed. Just because the shooter didn't intend to leave any evidence on the company-issued phone, doesn't mean that there wouldn't have been meaningful data on there that would advance the investigation and generate valuable leads. Think GPS info, or items that complete a timeline, etc. Here's an example. Suppose they uncovered GPS info from the phone that showed that the shooter visited a particular location frequently in the days leading up to the attack. FBI checks that location out, and discovers that it is implicated in another ongoing investigation for money laundering. The other investigation wasn't tied to terrorism, but this thread creates a link and enables another source of support to be found and squashed. My example is just an illustration of one of many possible ways the data on the phone could advance the case. It's absolutely worth pursuing. To be clear, I'm 100% opposed to any attempts at government backdoors, and I sided with Apple when they refused the FBI's request initially, but that doesn't mean the Bureau should just shrug their shoulders and not do their job.
Kequc 10y ago
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.
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d_t_w 10y ago
$180k is a dangerously small amount to pay someone with James Comey's responsibility.
- pyvpx 10y ago
  the fringe benefits and consulting/speaking fees post-FBI make up for it and then some.
makecheck 10y ago
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 time you purchase however, 1% of the proposed sum comes out of that $X salary; now then, how judicious will you be? 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 personally not mind chipping in something, right? Predictably, a very small number of congresspeople were suddenly willing to go quite that far.
- epmatsw 10y ago
  Reminds me of Not Yours To Give: http://www.constitution.org/cons/crockett.htm http://www.constitution.org/cons/crockett.htm
  - function_seven 10y ago
    Thanks for that link. Great read.
- rmc 10y ago
  I've often seen people propose things like that, such as congress being paid the average salary or maybe even no salary. However they're much more likely to take kickbacks if they have the power and not the money.
  - makecheck 10y ago
    Kickbacks are a risk, though that could also be balanced with harsh penalties such as minimum sentences for being caught accepting kickbacks.
yohann305 10y ago
this money comes out off our pockets.. YAY. NAY
mkhpalm 10y ago
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.
dschweig 10y ago
If over $1M is reasonable, I wonder what Comey would deem as an "unreasonable" amount and the rationale behind the calculation.
chris_wot 10y ago
Apparently $1 million is how much it costs to discover that no information was on the phone.
ryporter 10y ago
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.
- azazqadir 10y ago
  Exactly. Think about the resources they put on this case. It should worth way more than $1M and all that came from tax payers money.
known 10y ago
Why not www.iphoneasyunlock.com
mytrile 10y ago
I hope people posting articles behind paywall get paid.
sixtypoundhound 10y ago
Ugh - total paywall on the article. 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.
bobwaycott 10y ago
I'd like a refund, please.

316 points by maibaum 10y ago

Same article on the FT: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/af23e3ea-07f1-11e6-b6d3-746f8e9cdd33.html#axzz46UpvC84n http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/af23e3ea-07f1-11e6-b6d3-746f8e9cdd... 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.”

RIMR 10y ago
>paying outside technologists to find ways to access highly-encrypted messages on phones used by terrorist suspects was not “scalable.” Good! I don't want it to be "scalable". That means they want to expand the data that they are collecting to include more a more phones. There is no need to do that!
- dclowd9901 10y ago
  Yeah. I thought the whole point of court ordered warrants was to NOT be scalable, cause, you know, due process or whatever.
fweespee_ch 10y ago
> 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.” That is exactly what we want. If its clearly in the public interest to expended substantial effort as part of a criminal investigation, they absolutely should do so. The problem is they want scalable access to everything.
- newjersey 10y ago
  Was there something on the phone what made it worth it? I don't know if I understand the hypocrisy of hn. We cry "oh humanity" when Ford pays $50k over sticker for a new Tesla car for reverse engineering but of course if the FBI does something then surely they were judicious with their purse strings. Surely.
  - fweespee_ch 10y ago
    > Was there something on the phone what made it worth it? It doesn't matter to me tbh. They want to investigate, they can. I just don't want them to be able to "scale" their investigations like they seem to want so they can get into all encrypted communications without a serious financial hurdle because they'll abuse it. > I don't know if I understand the hypocrisy of hn. We cry "oh humanity" when Ford pays $50k over sticker for a new Tesla car for reverse engineering but of course if the FBI does something then surely they were judicious with their purse strings. I didn't. Generalizing like that is unhealthy because it causes you to make some silly assumptions.
MichaelGG 10y ago
At what scale are they accessing the hardware of terrorists anyways?
Negative1 10y ago
The only reason it would be 'Worth it' is if they found something of note (something to help prosecution of other criminals or prevent further attacks). Is there any reason to believe that this hack accomplished this? What else would make it 'worth it'? Or is this just politicking?
- CHaro 10y ago
  It's just politicking, its "worth it" because they get to flex their muscle and show the world that they don't need apple's cooperation to get what they want.
  - lisper 10y ago
    And because it wasn't their own money.
    - EdHominem 10y ago
      That's an important point. They're paid our money, to plot ways to spend more of our money on marketing and lawyers, to misinform us.
  - colejohnson66 10y ago
    And because they didn't get to see their precious All Wits Act request struck down setting a precedent against them. A few million to be able to keep invoking the AWA would definitely be "worth it" in their eyes.
- euyyn 10y ago
  > Is there any reason to believe that this hack accomplished this? You mean besides the fact that the FBI guy said it was worth it? You don't expect them to publish the intel they got from the phone before being able to act on it, no?
- adrr 10y ago
  I doubt it was worth it. It wasn't even the terrorist's phone. It was owned by their employer. The terrorists destroyed their personal phones prior to attack.
isleyaardvark 10y ago
> was not “scalable.” This is the same James Comey that said they just were just asking Apple for access to just that one phone.
- and-can 10y ago
  “The relief we seek is limited and its value increasingly obsolete because the technology continues to evolve. We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist’s passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a decade to guess correctly. That’s it. “We don’t want to break anyone’s encryption or set a master key loose on the land,” Comey continued. “I hope thoughtful people will take the time to understand that. Maybe the phone holds the clue to finding more terrorists. Maybe it doesn’t. But we can’t look the survivors in the eye, or ourselves in the mirror, if we don’t follow this lead. “
  - vitd 10y ago
    That's a lot of double-speak. They know that removing the timeout so they can try thousands of passwords per second opens up a huge security hole. What he's saying is "we want it both ways". We don't want to take away security for users, we just want to make it easier for someone who's not the owner of the phone to get into it.
    - ikeboy 10y ago
      The government owned the iPhone in question.
      - rubyfan 10y ago
        "The government" is not one organization.
        ikeboy 10y ago
        That doesn't seem relevant unless there's a dispute over ownership, which there isn't.
moomin 10y ago
It was worth it to get out of a court case they were obviously losing that would establish precedent.
- gscott 10y ago
  Since they have other similar cases with more friendly judges to the FBI desires.
mwfunk 10y ago
I see two ways to interpret what he said, and I'm kind of appalled at both interpretations: (1) "We can't afford to pay someone every time we need to bypass security, therefore we need the ability to force third parties to do this work for free": um, OK. -or- (2) "Bypassing security takes too much time and effort, therefore we need a backdoor": even more horrifying, even though he's repeatedly denied that this is the endgame. Edit: typo
- orky56 10y ago
  He doesn't want a "backdoor" just special treatment time and again.
  - EdHominem 10y ago
    It's not an either-or. They want the backdoor so they don't have to ask, and they want a new backdoor created anytime they ask.
Joof 10y ago
Making it not scalable is the point. It places a monetary restriction so that they have to pick and choose what devices they think are worth hacking and which ones are not. This is the balance between citizen's rights and government power. Otherwise we just collect everyone's data on everything all the time and have access to everything.
- djrogers 10y ago
  Why would you expect them to be responsible with money that isn't theirs? Your argument would work for an individual, and to a lesser extent a corporation (where money spent comes out of profit and would be balanced against benefit), but the government plays with your money - not their own. If they want to get into a hundred phones, they'll just ask congress for an appropriation for $100m. And since the government is one of its own largest lobbyists, it'll happen.
  - Joof 10y ago
    They don't have unlimited money. If they can bring it down to $1000 per phone to crack, they still can't crack millions of phones without wondering why their budget is allocated this way.
hardwaresofton 10y ago
Along what dimension is this "not scalable"? If you have 100 iPhoneCs and the exploit works on all of them, it sounds like it's very scalable to me. It doesn't scale across every iphone ever made (or that will be made), but honestly, with a few tweaks (maybe a forced OS downgrade, whatever), it could be made to be. Also, if you don't release the attack vector, things get even murkier. Plus, the government happens to be the entity that prints our money, as well as an entity that is essentially limitless in funds because it extracts it's budget from US. Competition from firms may keep the price of breaking the iphone down, well within what the government can pay without anyone noticing (once this dies down). Nevermind companies that would LOVE to sell the NSA a single iphone exploit for anywhere close to $1M.
- reynoldsbd 10y ago
  I think he meant "scalable" in terms of the amount of money, time and effort it will take to overcome each subsequent security obstacle faced by law enforcement. In that sense, this whole Apple-FBI fiasco was certainly not scalable. Also, money is a very real limiting factor. The government can't just print more money to solve its problems.
  - vectored 10y ago
    Could you explain that, please? I had understood that the 3 rounds of QE essentially achieved this?
zanny 10y ago
Can I live in a country that doesn't think a million dollars to break encryption on one phone is worth it? I value my tax dollar way more than they seem to, and way more than 50 thousand dollar air conditioners for jet fighters.
- bendykstra 10y ago
  Air conditioning in most jet fighters is a necessity in order to keep the avionics cool.
ipsin 10y ago
Was it "worth it" because they dodged the potential for setting a precedent that limited the FBI's power? It doesn't seem like it was "worth it" because they found useful evidence on the phone.
stephengillie 10y ago
This also has a paywall. Is there a non-paywalled version of this story, or will this story remain irrelevant to my life forever? (If it were relevant to myself and others, someone would create a non-paywalled version of the story, maybe so simply as just retyping here what they've read elsewhere. Humans see censorship, paywalls, etc as damage and route around them, as long as positive value is generated.)
mtgx 10y ago
That's why you're supposed to use law enforcement resources where you know it makes a difference. The FBI made this whole circus around this phone when everyone already knew they wouldn't found anything. But worst of all, they didn't even bother to check the metadata for that phone, which would've also confirmed whether the phone was used to set-up crimes or not. It was all a ruse to get their precedent for backdoors, and now they're dripping this (probably bullshit) story to the media in a way that further progresses their agenda, after classifying the information in the first place.
ascotan 10y ago
Not scalable as in 'we can't spend a year breaking into every version of OSX', not 'we can't spend a million dollars breaking into every version of OSX'. Because a million bucks is chump change in government spending.
_pmf_ 10y ago
> as paying outside technologists to find ways to access highly-encrypted messages on phones used by terrorist suspects was not “scalable.” It would be fucking hilarious if he used this kind of language to mock the SV lingo.

tomtoise 10y ago

Paywalled for me here in the UK. I assume the title sums up the article? 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..? Cheers

pavel_lishin 10y ago
> The Federal Bureau of Investigation paid more than $1 million for a hacking tool that opened the iPhone of a terrorist gunman in San Bernardino, Calif., the head of the agency said Thursday. > Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum in London, FBI Director James Comey didn’t cite a precise figure for how much the government paid for the solution to cracking the phone but said it was more than his salary for the seven-plus years remaining in his term at the FBI. > His annual salary is about $180,000 a year, so that comes to $1.26 million or more. > “[We] paid a lot’’ for the hacking tool, Mr. Comey said. “But it was worth it.’’ I wonder how exactly it's worth it, given that nothing of interest of relevance was found on the device.
- losteric 10y ago
  Well now they have a tool they can use at any time.
  - tomtoise 10y ago
    I was just thinking this. Again, I haven't been able to read the article but I was under the impression that the FBI paid to crack this one phone, I didn't realize that they have this tool that could 'hack' more iPhones with.
  - LeifCarrotson 10y ago
    On iPhone 5. Until Apple updates the software to fix the vulnerability.
    - imaginenore 10y ago
      If they know what to fix. FBI aren't idiots to tell them.

Shicholas 10y ago

Next time they should just bring the phone to RSA and have their pick of vendor-booth-magician to decrypt it.

readams 10y ago

No paywall link: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-paid-more-than-1-million-for-san-bernardino-iphone-hack-james-comey/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-paid-more-than-1-million-for...

Aelinsaar 10y ago

This really seems like a terrible market for a state to be so openly involved in.

joeld42 10y ago
So they should be clandestinely involved, instead? They're going to do it anyways, I'd rather know about it.
- Aelinsaar 10y ago
  False dichotomy is false. They didn't have to do this, and by all accounts, received nothing of value for the money.
  - jsprogrammer 10y ago
    Don't they have a tool to get into other iPhone's now? $1,000,000 doesn't seem too bad.
    - carlosdp 10y ago
      Not necessarily, they might not own the tool, just paid for someone to use it on the phone.
      - jsprogrammer 10y ago
        The subtitle quote indicates that the tool was bought outright.
    - orky56 10y ago
      You can't put a price on national security. Never mind, they just did and they got to define national security as well.
    - Absentinsomniac 10y ago
      AFAIK, the exploit only works on older iphones. It'll quickly lose value going forward.

agsimeonov 10y ago

Were they going to pay Apple if they had somehow forced them to do the deed?

danielweber 10y ago
Yes.
belltaco 10y ago
Example: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/verizon-att-get-most-bucks-from-feds-for-wiretaps/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/verizon-att-get-most-bucks-from-... >AT&T, for example, imposes a $325 "activation fee" for each wiretap and $10 a day to maintain it. Smaller carriers Cricket and U.S. Cellular charge only about $250 per wiretap. But snoop on a Verizon customer? That costs the government $775 for the first month and $500 each month after that, according to industry disclosures made last year to Congressman Edward Markey. >And while Microsoft, Yahoo and Google won't say how much they charge, the American Civil Liberties Union found that email records can be turned over for as little as $25.
- coldcode 10y ago
  So the only argument the FBI hears is how much? Disgusting.
  - discreditable 10y ago
    An argument you could make is that by associating a cost with wiretapping it discourages frivolous usage.
    - kabdib 10y ago
      Since when did the FBI care about spending money that they get from taxpayers?

aidanhs 10y ago

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). 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). 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.

tantalor 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treason https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treason
fweespee_ch 10y ago
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/06/damn-equities-sell-your-zero-days-navy https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/06/damn-equities-sell-you... > Noted eagle eye and EFF Investigative Researcher Dave Maass happened on an interesting item from earlier this week on FedBizOpps, the site for government agencies to post contracting opportunities. The Navy put up a solicitation explaining that the government wants “access to vulnerability intelligence, exploit reports and operational exploit binaries affecting widely used and relied upon commercial software,” including Microsoft, Adobe, Android, Apple, “and all others.” If that weren’t clear enough, the solicitation explains that “the vendor shall provide the government with a proposed list of available vulnerabilities, 0-day or N-day (no older than 6 months old). . . .The government will select from the supplied list and direct development of exploit binaries.” http://www.zdnet.com/article/nsa-purchased-zero-day-exploits-from-french-security-firm-vupen/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/nsa-purchased-zero-day-exploits... > The National Security Agency bought hacking tools from a security firm, based on documents unearthed by a FOI request. The US is doing it. The GCHQ likely does it too and I bet at least some of this list was built via information purchased from others: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/07/gchq_catalog_of.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/07/gchq_catalog_...

VT_Drew 10y ago

McAfee offered to do it free of charge. Should have took him up on that, rather than wast $1M.

mtmail 10y ago
McAfee's offer was a PR stunt. He admitted it a week later.
- duskwuff 10y ago
  And he made a series of public statements which made it clear he had no understanding whatsoever of the technical issues involved. First, he claimed that he would use "social engineering" to access the phone's data. Later, he claimed that he could do it easily by clearing the area of flash memory containing the phone's password, apparently unaware of the fact that the password was used as a key to encrypt data. Source: http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/john-mcafee-better-prepare-to-eat-a-shoe-because-he-doesnt-know-how-iphones-work/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/john-mcafee-better-p...
  - HappyTypist 10y ago
    Social engineering could plausibly work against Apple employees.
    - djrogers 10y ago
      Which is undoubtedly one of the many reasons why  didn't want to create the software necessary to unlock the phone.
      - serf 10y ago
        ot: it's oddly satisfying to me that the Apple unicode is broken for my browser.

refriedbeans3 10y ago

That's it?

gist 10y ago
a) The amount is nice since I think they apparently approached them after figuring out how to do this. So impossible to think anywhere near that amount of work was actually involved. b) Establish and prove they can do the job. Will get other work like this and be able to charge more. Really no different than what the local handyman or plumber does in some cases.

techterrier 10y ago

Is that it? Had they found a way to do it internally it could easily have cost 10x more.

i_dunno 10y ago
I agree.
ascotan 10y ago
5 people, 1 year = 1million. Likely a team of 4 devs and a PM. 10months to prototype, 2 months to clean up and release? Sounds reasonable.

pbreit 10y ago

Is that a lot or a little?

LeifCarrotson 10y ago
It's a lot if they want to hack millions of iPhones each year. As a one-off engineering project to break into an iPhone, it seems remarkably reasonable.
potatohaven 10y ago
It's about par. Some security firms will charge $1M/year and over. Corporate enterprises involved in intelligence gathering for the government (i.e. ATnT, Apple, Google, Microsoft, basically any "free" and paid tech service) can make a lot of money depending on how many accounts they pass off to the FBI,NSA, etc... If you're using any service in the US and the "West", even the "free speech" stuff like ytcombinator, reddit, they'll pass of information and can charge for it. edit: Apple's encryption fight, for example, is a bit of a wash. It's basically to lure in more users which they can charge more for. The more value the user has for their privacy, the more companies can charge for access. They are all corporate enterprises, and their responsibility is to profit for their shareholders. When the government offers a legal profitable offer, they have a responsibility to take it. If they are found not to take it, and a group or party finds out and can prove it was a profitable venture, they can attack the company with the courts.
- matt4077 10y ago
  That's bullshit. Management has wide-ranging freedom to define what they see as the best course of action and nothing short of fraud is actionable in a court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule. In this case, the obvious defense would be that for a company such as Apple, the fees they charge the government for access are completely meaningless, compared to the damage the brand could suffer if they're found violating their user's privacy. At 25$ each as mentioned above, these fees probably don't even cover the costs of having a lawyer take a quick look at it.

ikeboy 10y ago

https://archive.is/OfqcJ https://archive.is/OfqcJ

kureikain 10y ago

Where did that $1M come from? If it's from tax I'll say that a big waste.

beamatronic 10y ago
Don't worry, it came from the Federal Reserve's printing press
ProAm 10y ago
Where else does it come from?
- thisisdave 10y ago
  legalized theft [0] [0]: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512253265073870 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240531119034809045765122...
- djrogers 10y ago
  We financed it - your kids will be paying for it.
amalcon 10y ago
Why does the source of money change the efficiency of a given use?

nickbauman 10y ago

I find it interesting that this entire issue is the same as the nuclear issue was in the cold war. Government Technocrats: We need bigger and more powerful warheads to protect us from the Soviets. General Public: OK we'll learn Duck and Cover. Sensible Few: Is risking the destruction of everything we're trying to protect worth it? Government Technocrats: We can't look our children in the eye ... yadda yadda yadda.

epalm 10y ago

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?

ikeboy 10y ago
Except the other cases haven't been dropped, and this case was perhaps the one most sympathetic to the government (terror).

WalterBright 10y ago

I'm in the wrong profession!

amptorn 10y ago

I still don't believe they've actually hacked it. There's no evidence that they have.

godgod 10y ago

"$1M and all I got was this lousy t-shirt"

mindslight 10y ago

I'm trying to see what's around the corner for this argument. 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 benefits the administrating critters, the FBI, and the contractors doing the work. 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 aren't worth $1M. 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. It seems like a dead-end for propaganda purposes. What am I missing? Maybe they're just trying to salt the earth so that their technical success in this case does not hinder them arguing for backdoors next time?

droithomme 10y ago

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?

cpncrunch 10y ago
It was worth it because they didn't know that beforehand. Now the FBI are sure that the attackers weren't in contact with other ISIS members. The FBI thinks that information is worth the $1.2M+ they paid. How could they possibly have known that without unlocking the phone?
- djrogers 10y ago
  > Now the FBI are sure that the attackers weren't in contact with other ISIS members. Umm, no - no they aren't. Not even close. The terrorists personal phones were destroyed before the FBI could recover them, this was just a 'work phone'. Don't you think it's likely that a) there is a reason they destroyed their personal phones, and b) if they were going to communicate with other actors they'd be more likely to use the phone that's completely under their control?
  - cpncrunch 10y ago
    Yes, you're right. I guess the FBI just confirmed that there was no info on the work phone, which seems a valid line of inquiry.
- sailfast 10y ago
  Metadata?
- EdHominem 10y ago
  On the work phone, sure. Yay. You do know that they destroyed their personal phones, right? And that it's been months now, wasted bickering with Apple even if there would have been any leads. > How could they possibly have known that without unlocking the phone? Smart money says they already unlocked it with an exploit and knew there was nothing, then played legal games with Apple until they started losing, and to exit gracefully they accepted the offer of one of the many firms begging to extract data from the phone for them. They have the NSA's phone number. They were playing helpless for a reason.

tn13 10y ago

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.

cpncrunch 10y ago
I'm not entirely sure how you can call 14 deaths "non-existent".
- digler999 10y ago
  not sure how cracking encryption will "un-kill" even one of those people.
  - cpncrunch 10y ago
    Who said it will? It's to prevent it happening again.
    - digler999 10y ago
      I thought that's what all the illegal mass-surveillance was for ?
    - passwordreset 10y ago
      What? The government pwning some terrorists iPhone will prevent terrorist attacks from happening again? How? I'm completely gobsmacked at the line of reasoning here.
      - function_seven 10y ago
        The reasoning is that there may be new information that helps identify conspirators or abettors. We all know the chances of finding smoking-gun type evidence on that phone was slim, but that doesn't mean you ignore possible leads when attempting to piece together how a crime was committed. Just because the shooter didn't intend to leave any evidence on the company-issued phone, doesn't mean that there wouldn't have been meaningful data on there that would advance the investigation and generate valuable leads. Think GPS info, or items that complete a timeline, etc. Here's an example. Suppose they uncovered GPS info from the phone that showed that the shooter visited a particular location frequently in the days leading up to the attack. FBI checks that location out, and discovers that it is implicated in another ongoing investigation for money laundering. The other investigation wasn't tied to terrorism, but this thread creates a link and enables another source of support to be found and squashed. My example is just an illustration of one of many possible ways the data on the phone could advance the case. It's absolutely worth pursuing. To be clear, I'm 100% opposed to any attempts at government backdoors, and I sided with Apple when they refused the FBI's request initially, but that doesn't mean the Bureau should just shrug their shoulders and not do their job.

Kequc 10y ago

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.

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reginaa 10y ago

d_t_w 10y ago

$180k is a dangerously small amount to pay someone with James Comey's responsibility.

pyvpx 10y ago
the fringe benefits and consulting/speaking fees post-FBI make up for it and then some.

makecheck 10y ago

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 time you purchase however, 1% of the proposed sum comes out of that $X salary; now then, how judicious will you be? 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 personally not mind chipping in something, right? Predictably, a very small number of congresspeople were suddenly willing to go quite that far.

epmatsw 10y ago
Reminds me of Not Yours To Give: http://www.constitution.org/cons/crockett.htm http://www.constitution.org/cons/crockett.htm
- function_seven 10y ago
  Thanks for that link. Great read.
rmc 10y ago
I've often seen people propose things like that, such as congress being paid the average salary or maybe even no salary. However they're much more likely to take kickbacks if they have the power and not the money.
- makecheck 10y ago
  Kickbacks are a risk, though that could also be balanced with harsh penalties such as minimum sentences for being caught accepting kickbacks.

yohann305 10y ago

this money comes out off our pockets.. YAY. NAY

mkhpalm 10y ago

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.

dschweig 10y ago

If over $1M is reasonable, I wonder what Comey would deem as an "unreasonable" amount and the rationale behind the calculation.

chris_wot 10y ago

Apparently $1 million is how much it costs to discover that no information was on the phone.

ryporter 10y ago

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.

azazqadir 10y ago
Exactly. Think about the resources they put on this case. It should worth way more than $1M and all that came from tax payers money.

known 10y ago

Why not www.iphoneasyunlock.com

mytrile 10y ago

I hope people posting articles behind paywall get paid.

sixtypoundhound 10y ago

Ugh - total paywall on the article. 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.

bobwaycott 10y ago

I'd like a refund, please.