OF THE
TIMES

My trip to Baghdad (September 6-11) has left me slack jawed. I have struggled to find the correct historical analogy to describe a vibrant, historically important Middle Eastern city being slowly bled to death. Berlin and Dresden in World War II were devastated but they and their populations were not subjected to seven years of occupation that included ethnic cleansing, segregation of people by religious identity, and untold violence perpetrated upon them by both military and private security services. I have not been to Gaza but suspect that the dehumanizing effects are somewhat similar. ... The occupation and especially the walling off of neighborhoods have destroyed the very fabric of the urban society.
If the government already has its own access to the iPhone, then the FBI's chosen "debate" with Apple is an exercise in wearing down public resistance to the surveillance state.I am going to tell the world exactly how we do this. Now I'll probably lose my admission to the world hackers' community, however I want to tell you. You need a hardware engineer and a softer engineer. The hardware engineer takes the phone apart, and copies the instruction set, which are the iOS and applications and your memory. And then you run a program called a disassembler, which takes all the ones and zeros and gives you readable instructions. Then the coder sits down and he reads through. What he is looking for is the first access to the keypad, because that is the first thing you do, when you input your pad. It'll take half an hour. When you see that then he reads the instructions for where in memory this secret code is stored - it is that trivial - a half an hour.

Comment: See also: