Redlin5 said:
I do not like Apple normally but here, in this instance, I side with them. Its a complex situation but a government backdoor into security just leads to that key getting distributed to the people who nobody wants to arm it with.
But that's not even what they're asking for.
Gordon_4 said:
Here's what I don't understand though: I'm no expert on this myself but I've worked with plenty who are: isn't it possible that they can simply run a data recovery tool on the phone after the wipe has occurred and the device is restored to it's factory defaults? Am I to believe that Apple have developed an erasure technology that leaves NOTHING recoverable by data security experts?
Very easily. Normally, when a file is deleted, you just remove the directory entry for the file, which contains some metadata on the file, but more importantly: where you can find the file on the disc. This means that all the actual data is still there. This kind of deletion is fairly doable for software to backwards engineer: you start looking for blocks of data on the disk which are non-random and attempt to figure out which blocks form a coherent thing together.
However, a good factory reset doesn't just remove the entire list of "you can find these files here", but also overwrites all the data in those files with either random bits, or just 1s or 0s. This way, it's more or less impossible to get the data back, since it's actually overwritten.