San Bernardino DA Makes Truly Stupid Claim in Court Filing
Some things are so stupid you just can’t let them go. In a court filing, San Bernardino District Attorney Michael Ramos said that “The seized iPhone may contain evidence that can only be found on the seized phone that it was used as a weapon to introduce a lying dormant cyber pathogen that endangers San Bernardino’s infrastructure.” Clearly, the DA should drop his day job in favor of writing science fiction where “dormant cyber pathogen” might actually mean something. In an interview with Ars Technica, prominent iOS security expert Jonathan Zdziarski said, “This reads as an amicus designed to mislead the courts into acting irrationally in an attempt to manipulate a decision in the FBI’s favor. It offers no evidence whatsoever that the device has, or even might have, malware on it. It offers no evidence that their network was ever compromised. They are essentially saying that a magical unicorn might exist on this phone.”
I just stumbled on this post and noticed that this post was dated March 4th. The Python’s Revenge (CSI Cyber) episode aired on March 2nd. In that episode Python, an evil hacker had left some code hidden on FBI systems hmmm…. a “dormant cyber pathogen” if you will. This code was then triggered when FBI agents navigated to an IP address where the abduction of Avery Ryan’s surrogate daughter was being streamed. The FBI had to decide whether to terminate the stream (securing their system but killing the abducted victim) or stay tuned in (keeping the victim alive but leaving their system vulnerable). No need to write science fiction when you can get it from CBS. http://www.cbs.com/shows/csi-cyber/
Write science fiction? He would have to learn to write English first.
He could write in Klingon, perhaps. ;-)
Zdziarski has a further takedown of this on his blog at http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=5849
And Ramos is running for California Attorney General in 2018: http://www.joinmikeramos.com.
OMG.
He's setting up a ticking time bomb rationale for undermining encryption. Which is as irrational as his sentence structure.