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Pantry Essentials for Scratch Cooking

The 25 Pantry Essentials You Need for Scratch Cooking

- Daisy  Luther, The Organic Prepper

Does your pantry contain all of the basics for scratch cooking? There are 25 ingredients that you need in your pantry at all times to cook from scratch.
More and more people are reclaiming the lost art of cooking from scratch in an effort to save money and avoid the trend toward processed food. A good pantry should have everything you need to whip together a pie, a loaf of bread, a casserole, or a batch of biscuits with no trip to the store required.
This is a list from my book, The Pantry Primer, of the things you need to go with your whole foods to turn them into delicious meals, so you won’t find things like canned goods, flours,  grains, meats, or veggies. These ingredients are the supporting actors to the starring roles. If you like to think ahead, be sure to acquire these items in multiples – you should never run out of them. Many of these basics can be purchased in large quantities. One of my favorite destinations for pantry basics is Amazon, where I purchase yeast, aluminum-free baking soda, and other building blocks of a scratch pantry. I have also acquired 50-pound bags of organic sugar at Bulk Barn for a reduced price.

What basics do you need for scratch cooking?

To build your stockpile, look through your cupboards and see what you use the most. Every kitchen will be different but below are my most-used items – the ones that I search out and buy in bulk.  Links are for high-quality versions of these items, as opposed to store brands that could come from more questionable sources. Feel free to select whatever version you prefer of the items – just be sure to load up and get prepped!

Baking Items

• Baking soda
• Baking powder
• Yeast
• Cocoa
• Nonfat dry milk

Fats

• Olive oil
• Coconut oil
• Shortening
• Butter
• Lard (we get this locally rendered)

Sweeteners

• White sugar
• Turbinado sugar
• Muscavado sugar/brown sugar
• Honey (I get this locally in bulk)
• Molasses
• Maple syrup (mine is a yearly Christmas present from Canada)
• Confectioner’s sugar

Other

• Salt
• White vinegar
• Apple cider vinegar
• Balsamic vinegar
• Black pepper
• Herbs and spices
• Cornstarch (please consider organic for all corn products)
• Lemon Juice

Chicken Jerky

In an effort to clean out our freezers for the upcoming gardening, chicken and turkey “season”, I have been making a lot of jerky lately.

My kids love it, my hubby loves it, and the dog loves it as much as she can. Well, when no one is looking anyway. After all the canning of chicken, (you can read that here) making of soup for the pantry (read that here) and broth galore,(read how I can my broth here) I needed to do something else with it. So, chicken jerky came to be in our home.

When I am cutting up a whole chicken, I usually save the breasts for later meals.

I also de-bone the thighs and use them like the breasts when I can. They are more versatile in recipes than the legs are, at least to me. So, it’s mainly leg meat I am using here. What you will need to do is cut very carefully down the leg meat and slice it in 1/2. Then, cut the main part of the meat off the bone. You will want to be using a very sharp knife for this, as it will minimize your risk of injury from it slipping.

The leg meat has a lot of tendons, and you will want to make sure to take as much off as you can.

This can easily be done with a sharp knife, and just cutting it as close to the meat as possible. Once you have your meat cut off the bones, stick the bones in some water and make some broth. Next, you will want to soak your meat in a marinade overnight.

I used my father’s recipe for beef jerky, tweaking it some for chicken.

What you need:

1 cup olive oil

1/2 cup apple cider vinegar

1 T. garlic powder

1 T. onion salt

1 tsp. black pepper

3 T soy sauce (get the homemade version here)

Simply add all the ingredients in a large bowl, and toss the chicken in. Stir to coat all the pieces, and allow to marinate for 12-24 hours.

Once the pieces have marinated

simply remove them, and place them on a dehydrator sheet. You can find the one I use here and dehydrate on medium high (145) for 12-24 hours. You do NOT want to be sampling this until it’s fully dry, or the germs may not be all killed. This is a great time to add beef jerky that the kids won’t touch, by the way. After 24 hours, check the pieces. They need to nearly break when you bend them. This way, you know the water is all out. Otherwise, you risk mold. Store in an airtight container for up to 4 months. Honestly, though, I haven’t had a batch last longer than a week…it’s that good!

Painkiller Crisis

Prescription Painkiller Crisis: Why Do Americans Consume 80 Percent Of All Prescription Painkillers?

 By Michael Snyder, on March 14th, 2016

If Americans are so happy, then why do we consume 80 percent of the entire global supply of prescription painkillers?  Less than 5 percent of the world’s population lives in this country, and yet we buy four-fifths of these highly addictive drugs.  In the United States today, approximately 4.7 million Americans are addicted to prescription pain relievers, and that represents about a 300 percent increase since 1999.  If you personally know someone that is suffering from this addiction, then you probably already know how immensely destructive these drugs can be.  Someone that was formally living a very healthy and normal life can be reduced to a total basket case within a matter of weeks.

And of course many don’t make it back at all.  According to the CDC, more than 28,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses in 2014.  Incredibly, those deaths represented 60 percent of all drug overdose deaths in the United States for that year…

A report released by the US Centers for Disesase Control and Prevention (CDC) in January revealed that drug-overdose deaths reached a new high in 2014, totaling 47,055 people. Opioids, a type of powerful painkiller that requires a prescription, were involved in 60% of those deaths.

Many Americans that start out on legal opioids quickly find themselves moving over to heroin because it is often cheaper and easier to obtain, and the U.S. is now facing a tremendous epidemic of heroin abuse as well.  In fact, the number of Americans that die of a heroin overdose nearly quadrupled between 2000 to 2013.

Finally, the federal government has started to take notice of this crisis.  A bill was recently passed to spend more than a billion dollars over the next two year fighting this problem.

But as long as doctors are writing thousands upon thousands of new prescriptions for these painkillers each year, this crisis is not going to go away any time soon.

In the Appalachians, these prescription painkillers are commonly known as “hillbilly heroin“, and all of the attention that the New Hampshire primaries received focused a lot of attention on how this crisis is destroying countless numbers of lives up in the Northeast.  But one survey found that the states with the biggest problems with painkiller addiction are actually in the West…

The National Survey on Drug Use and Health, a survey of approximately 67,500 people across the United States, found that the states with the highest rates of narcotic painkiller abuse were in the West – Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington.

Unless you are about to die, I would very strongly recommend that you resist any attempt by your doctor to put you on these “medications”.  Just consider what happened to one stay-at-home mother named Norah Mangan…

I am an educated, suburban wife and stay-at-home mother of four. Life had been good to me until a fateful visit with an orthopedic physician, my chief complaint being mild arthritic pain in my toes. My physician handed me the first of many monthly prescriptions for Oxycodone and what followed that appointment was a rapid descent into hell. Within six months, I had become a raving drug addict.

Before too long, Norah had to turn to means that were less than legal in order to keep fueling her addiction.  Her life was turned into a complete and utter disaster by drugs that were legally prescribed to her…

It wasn’t long before my legal monthly prescription fell woefully short in terms of keeping my life altering pain at bay. In the interest of not incriminating myself, I’ll simply share that when procured through other means, Oxycodone generally sells for one dollar per milligram. I was draining our savings and was out of my mind. I was so tortured that I didn’t care about the deterioration of my moral values, in fact, I didn’t even notice.It’s hard to imagine that in such a short period of time I had morphed from a Mrs. Cleaver, baking hot cinnamon buns in anticipation of my children’s arrival home from school, to Scarface crushing pills on the glass top of the executive desk in our home office while thinking to myself as I heard them arrive from school…why oh why are they home already?

You can read the rest of her amazing story right here…

The truth is that we are the most drugged people on the face of the planet.  It has been estimated that 52 million Americans over the age of 12 have used prescription drugs in non-medical ways, and this problem gets worse with each passing year.

According to research that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 59 percent of all U.S. adults are currently on at least one prescription drug, and 15 percent of all U.S. adults are on at least five prescription drugs.  And the numbers are far worse for older Americans.  The following statistics come from one of my previous articles…

–According to the CDC, approximately 9 out of every 10 Americans that are at least 60 years old say that they have taken at least one prescription drug within the last month.

–There is an unintentional drug overdose death in the United States every 19 minutes.

–In the United States today, prescription painkillers kill more Americans than heroin and cocaine combined.

–According to the CDC, approximately three quarters of a million people a year are rushed to emergency rooms in the United States because of adverse reactions to pharmaceutical drugs.

–The percentage of women taking antidepressants in America is higher than in any other country in the world.

–Children in the United States are three times more likely to be prescribed antidepressants as children in Europe are.

–A shocking Government Accountability Office report discovered thatapproximately one-third of all foster children in the United States are on at least one psychiatric drug.

–A survey conducted for the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that more than 15 percent of all U.S. high school seniors abuse prescription drugs.

We are a deeply unhappy nation that has been trained to turn to pills as a “quick fix” for our hurt and our pain.

Yes, there are medical situations that call for prescription pain relievers.  But what we are seeing in America today goes far, far beyond that.  We are a nation of addicts that is always in search of a way to fill the gaping holes that we feel deep in our hearts.  This prescription pain killer crisis is just another symptom of a much deeper problem.

So what is the solution?

The Great American Grocery Hoax - Daisy Luther

April 10, 2014

• in All, Resistance by Daisy Luther

The Great American Grocery Hoax

There is a big secret out there in the grocery store aisles that no one wants you to know.  There is a hoax of monumental proportions that is being perpetrated on the American public.

Before I tell you what it is, let me remind you of some things that you already know.

It’s no secret at all that the American economy is in dire straits. Unemployment has skyrocketed and today’s dollars buy a lot less than the dollars of just a few years ago. Even the most thrifty shopper will pay substantially more for a cart full of groceries.  To make matters worse, our country’s main food-producing areas have been devastated by droughts, and you can expect that prices will only go up from here.

So people work for slave wages, if they can find work at all, then go to the grocery store and buy what they can afford.  And that is where the secret comes in.

The secret is:

The stuff sold there is not actually food.

Nutritional Anarchy has posted a couple of videos recently about the massive number of ingredients in inexpensive processed food items.  You can learn about what is contained in a Hungry Man Homestyle Dinner HERE and about the gastronomical delights that 48 cents will buy you HERE.

If you’ve ever been broke, you can easily see how a “meal” for a couple of dollars or less would be an appealing addition to a grocery cart.

But here is the scary epiphany:

The stuff sold there is not actually food.

I guess this depends on one’s definition of the word “food”.

Dictionary.com says “food” is:

any nourishing substance that is eaten, drunk, or otherwise taken into the body to sustain life,provide energy, promote growth, etc.

Merriam-Webster says “food” is:

 material consisting essentially of protein, carbohydrate, and fat used in the body of an organism to sustain growth, repair, and vital processes and to furnish energy; also :  such food together with supplementary substances (as minerals, vitamins, and condiments)

The Oxford Dictionary says “food” is:

any nutritious substance that people or animals eat or drink, or that plants absorb, in order to maintain life and growth

Traditionally…and by traditionally I mean ever since there were humans on the planet eating stuff…food came from one of these sources: plants or animals.  It has been hunted, gathered, foraged, cultivated, and farmed.

But now these substances are being created in a lab environment. From purely synthetic ingredients, compounds are formed.  Sometimes a bit of the original food is present, perhaps a small bit of meat or vegetable or grain, and that item is stretched with chemicals to turn it into a food-like substance. The substance is shaped to look like food. It is artificially colored and molded into forms like some kind of semi-edible play-dough.  Then scents and flavors, also artificial, are added.  This makes the substances resemble food even more because now it tastes and smells like food.

Because it isn’t immediately lethal to ingest, those noble guardians at the FDA slap a label on it that the substance is GRAS – Generally Recognized As Safe.

Then the substance is placed into little plastic trays, foil, bags, or cellophane. That is placed inside a box with an illustration on the outside. The illustration looks like the food that the substance inside all of the packaging is supposed to taste like.  Perhaps it is a juicy roast beef dinner with mashed potatoes, savory gravy, and carrots.  Your brain processes this visual stimuli and expects that the substance contained within is indeed “food.”

But it isn’t.

It’s a scam.  People go to the store to buy food, but they are sold something else, something that only pretends to be food.

The stuff sold there is not actually food.

Only a tiny fraction of the contents of that box is actually food. Your ancestors would not recognize this as food at all.  If you dare to eat this, you are consuming a food substitute that is being passed off to you because there is no food left for the likes of us.  Most of what is being sold in the grocery store is NOT ACTUALLY FOOD. It is food-like substances. It is a pile of chemicals masquerading as food to satiate hunger and deceive those who consume it into believing that they are eating food and ingesting nutrients.

Did you ever see the movie Soylent Green? In the movie, the futuristic over-populated world no longer can provide food for the population.  Instead processed food-like substances are rationed out to keep people alive.  Initially, there was Soylent Yellow and Soylent Red, but then, a new product, Soylent Green, became available in limited quantities. The actual source of Soylent Green is a closely guarded secret: no one is allowed to know what is actually in it.  Consumers are deceived with some scientific sounding descriptions until the awful truth comes out.

Does this sound familiar?

While Soylent Green was actually made from ground up humans (sorry, spoiler), the origins of what is being sold in our groceries stores today are no less mysterious or closely guarded.  Soylent Green was so delectable to the unknowing public that they would commit heinous crimes to get more.  The food-like substances in the grocery stores are loaded with processed white sugar (which actually has addictive properties similar to heroin), high fructose corn syrup, and MSG, which stimulates the production of hunger hormones, giving a whole new meaning to that fun slogan, “Bet you can’t eat just one.”  If you eat this stuff,you will be hooked because they want you to be hooked.  You will be perfectly content feeding your addiction instead of nourishing your body.  You won’t even MISS actual food.  The next generation may not even know what actual food IS at the rate these processed concoctions are filling pantries and refrigerators in homes across the country. Those with lower incomes are particularly targeted by this, because unless you are making good money, it’s nearly impossible to purchase nourishing, whole foods.

I’ll give you a hint: if it is sold in a box and it has more ingredients than you have fingers, it probably isn’t food by any accepted definition.

It might keep you alive, but it will not keep you nourished and healthy.

Big Food doesn’t really care if you die from eating this stuff, as long as you don’t keel over immediately – then they’d be liable.  They don’t care if you develop cancer or if you are malnourished.  That actually just helps out their buddies at Big Pharma.  Then they can go play golf together on the proceeds.

There is a conspiracy afoot and you can find evidence of the massive deception as close as your nearest grocery store, fast food establishment, or corner store.  They are selling poisonous artificial food, and people are happily paying them for it.

Commit Nutritional Anarchy.

Rebel.  Just say no to food-like substances.  Declare war on Big Food.

• Refuse to eat these products that are flavored with brain-cell killing neurotoxins that tickle the pleasure centers in your brain and make you want more.
• Grow what you can – no matter how little, it is going to be better and healthier than what you’ll get at the store
• Buy ingredients instead of “meals” in a box.
• Cook from scratch.
• Visit your farmer’s markets or local farms.  (Find one near you HERE)
• Learn what to eat when you’re broke – make the best choices when you are on a tight budget.
• Build a whole-food pantry.

Straw Bale Gardening

Straw Bale Urban Gardening ~ Ideas and Getting Started

March 6, 2013 By Jacqueline

(source)

Straw Bale Urban Gardening ~ Ideas and Getting Started

If you’re an urban gardener, you may have thought of straw bale gardening. If you are hoping to find enough space to grow even a tomato plant or two, “building” a garden with straw bales creates a whole new range of possibilities.


For those with limited space, poor soil, or only one spot on your property that gets the proper sun exposure to grow food, it could be a great solution.
The bales (like most above-ground gardening techniques) will need extra water and fertilizer during the early period.  However, those early water needs will decrease as the bale decomposes. Later, it will be able to hold MUCH more water.
Earthworms also known as nightcrawlers are attracted to the damp straw that shelters them during hot weather. Their casting help bales to decompose and improve the soil bed as the bales compost.
You can find out more of the details here. This is one of the better posts on the topic because they recommend use of bone meal, fish meal, or compost for a more organic approach. Others recommend urea (horse or cow urine often contaminated with antibiotics and hormones) or other harsh chemical to condition your bales, but I would not use it. The post discusses:

• Straw Bale Selection
• Curing the Bale including Soaking and Fertilizer
• Planting
• Watering and more

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words:

Joel Karsten’s Cukes and squash in double rows~

Lettuces, arugula, spinach for fresh salads daily~

Cabbages, basil, and flowers~ tuck the flower starts right into the side of the bale and water.

(Wikipedia Commons)

Broccoli ~

Karsten’s Tomatoes in an arch with strong support~

Carrots~

Other vegetables to grow in straw-bale beds include parsley, green beans, mustard greens, peppers, potatoes, radishes, beets, okra, spring peas and zucchini in summer; in winter, chard, garlic, kale and leeks.

(Note: you can see the orange polyester binding cord above if you look closely)

One Other Way To Use Straw:

Last year we used wheat straw effectively for growing heirloom French Charentais melons. The straw (heavily laid down under and around the plants) helped keep the plants clean and from exposure to squash bugs.

Same with straw under raspberries. We found a heavy (6″) layer of straw under our Heritage red raspberries keeps out weeds, and it breaks down to wonderful compost, holds water in the soil, and increases soil nutrition!

Even if you have space limitations and want to garden on a smaller footprint than most, you can save a decent amount of money by growing your own food  — more than $1,200 if you plant tomatoes, potatoes, zucchini, salad greens or strawberries, according to the analysis of one Maine gardener.
So why don’t you give straw bale gardening a try on the small scale and see if you don’t love being able to grow your own fresh vine-ripened tomatoes!

Credit Card Debt is Killing You

Credit Card Debt In The United States Is Approaching A Trillion Dollars

 By Michael Snyder, on March 11th, 2016

For the first time ever, total credit card debt in the United States is approaching a trillion dollars.  Instead of learning painful lessons from the last recession, Americans continue to make the same horrendous financial mistakes over and over again.  In fact, U.S. consumers accumulated more new credit card debt during the 4th quarter of 2015 than they did during the years of 2009, 2010 and 2011combined.  That is absolutely insanity, because other than payday loans, credit card debt is just about the worst kind of debt that consumers could possibly go into.  Extremely high rates of interest, combined with severe penalties and fees, can choke the financial life out of almost any family in no time at all.

These days, most Americans use credit cards for various purposes, and they can be very convenient.

And if you pay them off every single month, they don’t become a problem.

Unfortunately, a lot of people are not doing this.  According to CNBC, total U.S. credit card debt rose by an astounding 71 billion dollars last year alone…

Last year, credit card debt in the U.S. surged by approximately $71 billion to $917.7 billion, according to a new study from CardHub.com. The research also found that most of the debt accrued in 2015 came in the fourth quarter, when Americans tacked on more than $52 billion.

“With 7 of the past 10 quarters reflecting year-over-year regression in consumer performance, evidence is mounting to support the notion that credit card users are reverting to pre-downturn bad habits,” CardHub CEO Odysseas Papadimitriou said in a statement.

And as noted above, things were particularly gruesome during the 4th quarter of last year.

According to Alternet, Americans added more credit card debt during those three months than during the entire years of 2009, 2010 and 2011 combined…

Not since we headed into the Great Recession of 2008 have we been quite so loosey-goosey with our credit cards, racking up debt with stunning speed. Of our 4Q totals, CardHub notes, “during this one quarter, we added more debt than in 2009, 2010 and 2011 put together.” That brings dollars owed to credit card companies by each debt-saddled American family up to $7,879, the highest since the Great Recession.

I can’t even begin to describe how unwise this is.  When I was in my twenties, I made the same mistakes that so many other Americans are making right now.  I very foolishly racked up large balances on my credit cards, and it took years of extremely painful payments to fix those mistakes.

In America today, 37 percent of all households maintain credit card balances from month to month, and the average level of credit card debt for those households is $15,700.  The following comes from CBS Minnesota…

According to NerdWallet, 37 percent of American households have credit card debt, which is defined as not paying off the full balance every month. Using data from the Federal Reserve of New York, U.S. Census and its own poll, NerdWallet found the average balance for those in credit debt is $15,700.

What most people don’t realize is that by letting balances run from month to month, you can end up paying just about as much in interest as you did for the original purchases.

Here is one credit card repayment scenario that comes from NerdWallet…

For the sake of simplicity in calculating the cost of the average credit card debt, let’s assume an APR of 16% and a fixed payment. We’ll also assume a minimum payment of 2% of the principal balance of $15,762, the average as of the end of 2015, or $315.

Based on those terms — and assuming you don’t add any more to your credit card balance — it would take 84 months, or seven years, to pay off the balance in full. During that time, you’ll pay $10,402 in interest — about two-thirds of the original balance — for a total of $26,164. This averages out to about $124 in interest per month.

The scenario above assumes that all payments are made on time.  But a single late payment can trigger higher interest rates, penalties and fees that can be absolutely suffocating.

In fact, some people end up paying back three, four or five times as much as they originally borrowed to the credit card companies.

If you use credit cards for convenience or to buy things online or to automatically pay bills, that is fine.  Just don’t let balances accumulate.  As you can see, that can be financial suicide.

And as we head into a new global recession, you definitely don’t want to be saddled with high levels of debt.  All of us have little luxuries that we can cut back on, and now is not the time to be living on the financial edge.

Just look at some of the troubling signs that we have seen in the news in recent days…

-The U.S. oil and rig count just dropped to the lowest level ever recorded

-One Houston CEO told employees that he was laying off that we have entered a “depression”

-It is being reported that 35 percent of all oil and gas companies around the world are at risk of falling into bankruptcy

-Unemployment in Canada just hit a three year high

-The number of job cuts in the United States skyrocketed 218 percent during the month of January according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas

-U.S. manufacturing activity has been in contraction for four months in a row

-U.S. factory orders have now fallen for 15 months in a row

-Subprime auto loan delinquencies have hit their highest level since the last recession

-Orders for Class 8 trucks in the United States dropped by 48 percent on a year over year basis in January

-The Restaurant Performance Index in the United States has dropped to the lowest level that we have seen since 2008

-Major retailers all over America are shutting down hundreds of stores

And this list does not even include all of the signs of severe economic trouble from around the rest of the planet that I have been writing about lately.

Credit card debt truly is financial poison, and it is not something that you want to have during the hard times that are coming.

Unfortunately, most Americans never learn, and they continue to rack up credit card debt as if there is no tomorrow even as the global economy starts to spiral downhill all around them.

Who PEED in Your Cereal?

March 14, 2016

• in All, Food, Health by Daisy Luther
• |
• 6 comments

The Phrase “Who Peed in Your Cereal” Takes on a Whole New Meaning

StumbleRedditPrintShIf you need another reason to avoid the processed foods that have taken over the American diet, here it is.

A cell phone video from inside the Kellogg’s factory in Memphis, Tennessee was just released, and it showed a man urinating on the conveyor belt full of cereal.  This wasn’t a video shot by someone else to expose something horrifying.  Nope. The urinator himself is the one who proudly took the video.

(Warning: If you’re eating a bowl of Rice Krispies right now, you might lose them. Nasty.)

Melissa Dykes of The Daily Sheeple pointed out something even more appalling. (And you probably thought it was already as gross as it could be):

Potentially “affected” (aka peed on) products include Rice Krispies Treats, Rice Krispies Treats cereal, and other puffed rice products. The company believes the video was recorded at Kellogg’s Memphis factory back in 2014, which means that all of the urination-tainted food has likely already been eaten.

Let me reiterate that. A bunch of people have already eaten peed-on cereal and cereal bars and had absolutely no idea what they consumed.  Do you really think this is an isolated incident? Who knows what kind of nose-picking, hiney-scratching, not-washing-hands-after-the-bathroom shenanigans are actually going on in those food factories?

Just last week, a study revealed that more than half of what Americans consumed is “ultra-processed” products, like Rice Krispies. Not only does this mean that your food isn’t actually food in many cases, but also that you are at the mercy of disgruntled and/or mentally unstable people who work on the assembly lines and don’t care one little bit about the products they’re in charge of. Do you really, truly want to eat stuff like that?

You really do have options.

• Take the challenge and go 100 days without any type of processed food.
• Cook from scratch.
• Learn how to eat again with this e-course (I took it and it’s excellent!)
• Here are 99 healthy meals and snacks if you don’t/can’t cook. (There are a few packaged items in this list that you could easily make yourself.)

Whatever option you choose, do your family a favor. Don’t put yourselves at the mercy of whatever person happens to be working the assembly line on the day your breakfast was put in a plastic package.

Cell Phone Privacy

Using This Phone Passcode Strategy Will Take The FBI 127 Years To Crack Your Encrypted Data

Mac Slavo February 20th, 2016 SHTFplan.com Comments (188) Read by 17,331 people

Note To Readers: This report is based on the assumption that Apple is on the up-and-up about their refusal to create backdoor tools for the FBI. As we know, however, intelligence agencies are experts at disinformation, so for all we know it is possible that backdoors already exist and what we have witnessed this week insofar as the encryption debate is concerned could be a psy-op designed to convince the public that their encryption is unhackable by government agencies. From a security perspective, we must assume that no electronic device is safe from prying eyes, as most theories on these matters are based on publicly known technologies and do not take into account top secret developments with quantum computing or advanced DARPA initiatives. 


Earlier this week Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote an open letter to the American public about the FBI’s attempts to compel the company to crack the iPhone of the San Bernadino Jihad attackers, saying that such a tool for the government is too dangerous to create. Google, Facebook and Twitter have now joined Apple in the phone encryption battle.
As explained by The Intercept, here’s a brief overview of what the FBI wants Apple to do:

The most obvious way to try and crack into your iPhone, and what the FBI is trying to do in the San Bernardino case, is to simply run through every possible passcode until the correct one is discovered and the phone is unlocked. This is known as a “brute force” attack.
…
One obstacle to testing all possible passcodes is that the iPhone intentionally slows down after you guess wrong a few times. An attacker can try four incorrect passcodes before she’s forced to wait one minute. If she continues to guess wrong, the time delay increases to five minutes, 15 minutes, and finally one hour. There’s even a setting to erase all data on the iPhone after 10 wrong guesses.
…
This is where the FBI’s requested backdoor comes into play. The FBI is demanding that Apple create a special version of the iPhone’s operating system, iOS, that removes the time delays and ignores the data erasure setting. The FBI could install this malicious software on the San Bernardino killer’s iPhone, brute force the passcode, unlock the phone, and access all of its data. And that process could hypothetically be repeated on anyone else’s iPhone.

The problem the FBI has is that the iPhone and other phones out there require a time-delay between passcode entries. Moreover, when a series of wrong passcodes is entered the delay is extended to as much as one hour, so even the fastest computer on the planet is rendered impotent while it waits for this delay to reset.

So the FBI is stuck using your iPhone to test passcodes. And it turns out that your iPhone is kind of slow at that: iPhones intentionally encrypt data in such a way that they must spend about 80 milliseconds doing the math needed to test a passcode, according to Apple. That limits them to testing 12.5 passcode guesses per second, which means that guessing a six-digit passcode would take, at most, just over 22 hours.

A six-digit passcode can be unlocked by the FBI in roughly a day. But according to the math behind the security feature, adding just 5 more digits could make hacking the phone in your lifetime almost impossible with current computing technologies (we’ll save quantum computing concepts for another time):

What if you use a longer passcode? Here’s how long the FBI would need:

• seven-digit passcodes will take up to 9.2 days, and on average 4.6 days, to crack
• eight-digit passcodes will take up to three months, and on average 46 days, to crack
• nine-digit passcodes will take up to 2.5 years, and on average 1.2 years, to crack
• 10-digit passcodes will take up to 25 years, and on average 12.6 years, to crack
• 11-digit passcodes will take up to 253 years, and on average 127 years, to crack
• 12-digit passcodes will take up to 2,536 years, and on average 1,268 years, to crack
• 13-digit passcodes will take up to 25,367 years, and on average 12,683 years, to crack

As The Intercept notes, remembering a totally random 11-digit passcode may seem like a daunting task, but anyone who was around before cell phone contact lists probably had at least five to ten different phone numbers memorized for family and close friends. This is essentially the same thing.
As a side note, using your phone’s fingerprint scanner as the primary mechanism for security is not sufficient.
First, a determined hacker, especially a state-sponsored one, could easily find a way to get your fingerprint, just as was done to Germany’s Minister of Defence in 2014 when hackers used internet photos of her hand to re-create her fingerprint. Second, and perhaps more importantly, a Virginia court has ruled you can be forced by police to unlock a phone or computer with your fingerprint – but not your password:

A Virginia state trial court held that a suspect “cannot be compelled [by the police] to produce his passcode to access his smartphone but he can be compelled to produce his fingerprint to do the same.”
….
Judge Frucci ruled that phone passwords were entitled to protection under the Fifth Amendment’s promise that no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.”He stressed that the password existed only in the defendant’s mind, and thus compelling the defendant to provide a passcode constituted a testimonial communication. The Fifth Amendment protects against such compulsion.

We live in a brave new world, and while you may think you have nothing to hide, keep in mind that with the literal millions of laws on the books in the United States theaverage American commits three felonies per day. Thus, if a law enforcement agency were to target you, they would most certainly find evidence of wrong doing and you can be assured that your phone will be one of the first pieces of evidence they will target.