The FBI and hackers

The New York Times has an op/ed by Fred Kaplan about the hacking problem:

The United States Justice Department announced this week that it was able to unlock the iPhone used by the gunman in the San Bernardino, California shooting in December of 2015, and that it no longer needed Apple’s assistance. FBI investigators have not said how they were able to access the smartphone, but a law enforcement official said that a company outside the government had helped them hack into the operating system.

Should hackers help the government?

The question implies that all hackers are bad guys or anarchists. In fact, some are patriots; many want to do good, not harm; and all of them love a puzzle.
For the past twenty years, US intelligence and law enforcement agencies have come to view some hackers as allies in the quest for cybersecurity. Many software companies pay bounties to hackers who find and exploit vulnerabilities in their programs, and dozens of professional hacking firms have risen up to meet the challenge.
Imagine the sheer sport of the FBI vs. Apple case: the FBI moans that it can’t crack the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone without Apple’s assistance; Apple claims its phones are so secure, the slightest compromise could do grave damage. Watching this standoff, clever hackers worldwide mused: “Let me give this a try.” One firm of such hackers has now succeeded, and may have taken its solution to the FBI, not to Apple, because Apple is one of the few giants of Silicon Valley that does not pay bounties.
Hackers have not been absorbed into the system entirely. Some are bad guys who do commerce with criminals or foreign spies. Some among the “white-hat hackers” are too rebellious to collude with government; others, who have tried, are turned away and certainly denied security clearances, because they’ve illegally downloaded music or movies in their wayward youth (which, in some cases, may have been just a few months ago).
The government should relax its standards. It’s long been known that hacking is a major problem, not just to personal banking accounts, but to the nation’s critical infrastructure and the military’s command networks. Often the best way to beat hacking is with another hacker, someone who can find and patch the holes before a bad guy exploits them. A lot of hackers want to help; the government should do more to let them.

Rico says this is a long way from being resolved...