Enlarge (credit: Yuri Samoilov ) A now-fired Philadelphia cop has been behind bars for almost two years for refusing to decrypt hard drives that authorities found at his residence as part of a federal child-porn investigation. On Thursday, his lawyers are set to ask a federal judge to release him while he appeals the reason for his confinement to the Supreme Court. If the justices take the case, it would be the first time they weighed the constitutionality of whether forcing somebody to decrypt hardware amounts to a Fifth Amendment violation. Francis Rawls The dispute concerns Francis Rawls, who has been serving an indefinite jail term after being held in contempt of court for refusing to unlock at least two FileVault-encrypted drives connected to an Apple Mac Pro. He has not been charged with any criminal offense even though the contempt order (PDF) was issued September 30, 2015. Both a federal judge and the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals did not agree with Rawls’ contention that forcing him to unlock the drives amounted to a violation of his Fifth Amendment right against being compelled to testify against oneself. The courts also concluded that it was a “foregone conclusion” that kid porn was on the drives because a forensic examination revealed that the “hash” values of the files have been linked by the authorities to known child pornography. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Man in jail 2 years for refusing to decrypt drives. Will he ever get out?
An anonymous reader shares a report: Despite being relatively easy, Apple keeps ignoring requests to enable a feature called Advanced Mobile Location (AML) in iOS. Enabling AML would give emergency services extremely accurate locations of emergency calls made from iPhones, dramatically decreasing response time. As we have covered before, Google’s successful implementation of AML for Android is already saving lives. But where Android users have become safer, iPhone owners have been left behind. The European Emergency Number Association (EENA), the organization behind implementing AML for emergency services, released a statement today that pleads Apple to consider the safety of its customers and participate in the program: “As AML is being deployed in more and more countries, iPhone users are put at a disadvantage compared to Android users in the scenario that matters most: An emergency. EENA calls on Apple to integrate Advanced Mobile Location in their smartphones for the safety of their customers.” Why is AML so important? Majority of emergency calls today are made from cellphones, which has made location pinging increasingly more important for emergency services. There are many emergency apps and features in development, but AML’s strength is that it doesn’t require anything from the user — no downloads and no forethought: The process is completely automated. With AML, smartphones running supporting operating systems will recognize when emergency calls are being made and turn on GNSS (global navigation satellite system) and Wi-Fi. The phone then automatically sends an SMS to emergency services, detailing the location of the caller. AML is up to 4, 000 times more accurate than the current systems — pinpointing phones down from an entire city to a room in an apartment. “In the past months, EENA has been travelling around Europe to raise awareness of AML in as many countries as possible. All these meetings brought up a recurring question that EENA had to reply to: ‘So, what about Apple?'” reads EENA’s statement. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader shares a report: A mysterious piece of malware has been infecting hundreds of Mac computers for years — and no one noticed until a few months ago. The malware is called “FruitFly, ” and one of its variants, “FruitFly 2” has infected at least 400 victims over the years. FruitFly 2 is intriguing and mysterious: its goals, who’s behind it, and how it infects victims, are all unknown. Earlier this year, an ex-NSA hacker started looking into a piece of malware he described to me as “unique” and “intriguing.” It was a slightly different strain of a malware discovered on four computers earlier this year by security firm Malwarebytes, known as “FruitFly.” This first strain had researchers scratching their heads. On the surface, the malware seemed “simplistic.” It was programmed mainly to surreptitiously monitor victims through their webcams, capture their screens, and log keystrokes. But, strangely, it went undetected since at least 2015. There was no indication of who could be behind it, and it contained “ancient” functions and “rudimentary” remote control capabilities, Malwarebytes’s Thomas Reed wrote at the time. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 