I read with disappointment John McAfee’s JOHN MCAFEE: I’ll decrypt the San Bernardino phone free of charge so Apple doesn’t need to place a back door on its product.
McAfee writes:
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So here is my offer to the FBI. I will, free of charge, decrypt the information on the San Bernardino phone, with my team. We will primarily use social engineering, and it will take us three weeks. If you accept my offer, then you will not need to ask Apple to place a back door in its product, which will be the beginning of the end of America.
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I don’t object to McAfee breaking the security on the San Bernardino phone, but I do object to him doing it for free.
McAfee donating services to governments with budgets in the $trillions sets a bad precedent.
First, it enables and encourages the government to continue hiring from the shallow end of the talent/gene pool for technical services. When it is stymied by ROT-13, some prince or princess will come riding in to save the day.
Second, we know the use of unpaid interns damage labor markets, Unpaid internships: A scourge on the labor market.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, “free” services cause governments and others to value those services as of little or no value. “Free” services degrade the value of those services in the future.
McAfee’s estimate of breaking the encryption on the San Bernardino phone in three weeks seems padded to me. I suspect there will be eighteen days of drunken debauchery concluded by three (3) actual days of work when the encryption is broken. For a total of twenty-one (21) days.
Open request to John McAfee: Please withdraw your offer to break the encryption on the San Bernardino phone for free. Charge at least $1 million on the condition that it is tax free. The bar you set for the hacker market will benefit everyone in that market.
The FBI interest in breaking encryption on the San Bernadino phone has nothing to do with that incident. Both the shooters in a spur of the moment incident are dead and no amount of investigation is going to change that. What the FBI wants is a routine method of voiding such encryption in the future.
To that extent, sell the FBI the decrypted phone and not the decryption method. So you can maintain a market for phone decryption on a case by case basis. Coupled with a high enough price for the service, that will help keep FBI intrusions into iPhones to a minimum.