“The Justice Department said on Monday that it might no longer need Apple’s assistance to help open an iPhone used by a gunman in last year’s San Bernardino, Calif., mass shooting, leading to a postponement of a key hearing over the issue and potentially sidestepping what has become a bitter clash with the world’s most valuable company,” Katie Benner reports for The New York Times.
“The dramatic turn of events came after the Justice Department said in a new court filing that as of Sunday, an outside party had demonstrated a way for the F.B.I. to possibly unlock the phone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the San Bernardino attackers.,” Melley reports. “‘Testing is required to determine whether it is a viable method that will not compromise data on Farook’s iPhone,’ the Justice Department wrote in the filing. ‘If the method is viable, it should eliminate the need for the assistance from Apple.’ The Justice Department added that it would file a status report by April 5 on its progress on unlocking the iPhone.”
Melley reports, “The law enforcement official declined to name the outside party that approached investigators with a possible method for opening the phone.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The U.S. government just blinked.
Let freedom ring!!!
SEE ALSO:
Apple hires corporate security chief amid legal battle against U.S. government overreach – March 19, 2016
Countdown to doomsday: Apple, FBI face off in court Tuesday – March 19, 2016
Apple sees weakness in FBI’s last-minute hearing request – March 18, 2016
The FBI has a big ulterior motive in its war against privacy and Apple’s encrypted iPhone – March 18, 2016
The law is clear: The FBI cannot make Apple rewrite iOS – March 18, 2016
Apple engineers, if ordered to unlock iPhone, might resist – March 17, 2016
Apple’s Tim Cook on FBI fight: ‘No one’s going dark’ – March 17, 2016
Harvard Law professor and former Obama special assistant dismisses FBI’s claims – March 17, 2016
Apple: The law already exists that protects us from U.S. government demands to hack iPhone – February 26, 2016
Well, surprise, surprise!!
“an outside party” = NSA
That we knew about the whole time.
I’m betting it’s MacAfee 😎
NSA just hired E. Schmidt💩 ‘The Mole’.
Scott Forstall, looking to pick up a li’l spare change? :p
“an outside party” = NSA
or the government accountability office
The other surprise will be when they announce that the phone contained “crucial” information to thwart an attack. However, they will not be able to tell us what it was because it will to be “classified” due to “nation security”
Apple says that being able to break into the iPhone should scare everyone. It’s a significant threat to national security. That engineers working on this would be in harms way as well. You all believe them and follow along.
The government now announces that they may have found a third party to break into the iPhone and get the data off of the phone.
None of you are afraid now. None of you are worried about national security and your own safety. None of you are attacking Apple for having a device that can be broken into in the very same way that they chatised the government for asking them to do.
Where is all of the worry for the people working on this from the third party? Where is all of the worry about national security over this? About your own safety now?
Maybe, the third party… is… Apple.
Do you know how to be anything other than an annoying asshole? Your tedious whining is getting old.
Not on your life government troll!
You’ll have to kill us first.
The distinction, which is evidently lost on you is that all companies work constantly to identify and resolve vulnerabilities in their product security. My expectation is that Apple is hot on identifying the vulnerability at work with this exploit, and will patch it as quickly as it can.
This differs greatly from a backdoor exploit, which is purposely put into the OS, which exists in the wild, which potentially cannot be patched, and always provides an area of vulnerability in the OS.
That is why there is less concern about an exploit than about an intentional back door.
Except the problem won’t go away as Apple increases security on it’s iOS devices and makes it even more difficult for Joe Hacker to circumvent devices on behalf of the government. In fact this supposed crack solution may not end up working after all.
And as Apple changes its OS, new bugs will be created and found and exploited. It’s en endless cycle that never stops.
Again, where are all of you screaming scared now that the iPhone could be hacked; a third party may do it with the FBI… it’s going to leak out! We’re all screwed!!! Run… Apple said!
Apple has a solid reputation for buggy software!
You are scared shit aren’t you troll???
Apple would leave the country and Its engineers would go to jail as would all 1Billion of its customers before the Government would force it to work for them.
Now fuck off and die you sick asshole.
Just sayin’! Sounds like you have had a bad day? Ahhhh bless you.
Gomer knew all along..
True or not, This leaves the fbi with a way to save face and get out of a losing court battle.
. . . and stop the public backlash.
True, for now. They’ll just be back with a better test case, for their purposes.
Interesting how everyone at MDN thinks the FBI should be embarrassed for not being able to crack Apple’s password lock. Until now, nobody could, except Apple.
Now that someone has, shouldn’t Apple be embarrassed for having a security hole in iOS?
I think you’re going to see a flurry of security updates from Apple in the next year, proving that Apple’s products aren’t as airtight as they lead everyone to believe. Better than MS or Google, sure, but not unbreakable.
It’s disingenuous to say Apple could crack the password lock or the encryption: they can’t. That’s the point.
Nobody else has either.
So far, it is unbreakable.
I think that’s a misperception.
1) The FBI claims so themselves in court dealings.
2) Everyone (even here at MDN) understood that this was not the point of the court dealings, but the FBI could not go out and claim the intended point in this court).
Chicken shit Comey knew he was losing the public opinion war…
Hats off Tim!
Not just the court of public opinion. I think the FBI knows that if the hearing is now it will get its ass handed to them there, too.
We all would have been better off if this actually went through the courts and there was a definitive decision
It ain’t over by a long shot, wer’e on pause…
Agreed – – this move seems to be the FBI ducking & running … specifically so that an unfavorable legal precedent against them **ISN’T** set in the courts.
Awesome. Imagine that. Apple can’t make a rock too big our God-like government can’t lift. Well now they can have their ego back for awhile.
Great news for everybody & Apple has lead the WORLD on this.
They have to wait till April 5 because the FBI isn’t eligible to upgrade their iPhone and try out till then. 😉
They=government
*”God-sized” ego
*led not lead
They figured Apple would’ve folded by now but Tim Cook refused to budge. They didn’t know who they were dealing with. David has slain Goliath once again as Apple defeats the mighty US government.
“The problem with playing chicken is to know when to flinch.”
— Capt. Bart Mancuso, USS Dallas, “The Hunt for Red October”
Between the FBI, DOJ and the presidential primaries the domestic supply of bull manure was exhausted. They need to import more before starting this all over again.
I’m sure if the fbi’s “outside party” is able to crack iOS 8-9 then the doj will publicize the hell over it to try and mess with Apple’s reputation. Now that could back fire too, leading more criminal types to enhanced encryption apps, something that maybe the nsa can’t crack.
The government executive branch did not think this through.
Apple’s supposedly on the way to updating the iOS security now. That should render the FBI crack null and useless. Hopefully.
Looks like that government troll got cold feet too huh?
This is so funny, “an outside party” will lead to such speculation as to who it was. This certainly has the potential to make the Keystone Cops look good, oh wait, that’s already been done.
McAfee? I think not.
Scott Forstall?
Now Comey, we still need judgement on that 200 year old writt,
Here, here !
Thanks Apple!
A “miracle” called NSA!!!!!!!!!!!!
FBI…….
Famous
But
Incompetent
This has been a colossal mess from the beginning, courtesy of the FBI.
The government has accomplished nothing but to speed up the efforts of Apple et. al. to encrypt everything. Apple engineers will not sleep until they have fixed the FBI’s requested hack AND have found and fixed the exploit tendered by the FBI’s new friend. In other words: The FBI shot themselves in the foot.
Streisand effect
Fire: Comey and Lynch; chastise Obama. They took oaths to uphold the Constitution.
But anyway, it is too late. All Silicon Valley has been challenged by this. They have been put on red alert. They will be figuring out serious encryption forevermore.
Like Steve said: Security is a game of cat-and-mouse. It never ends. The geeks will surely win this one.
Except for Gaagle and Eric the Mole.
It’s only a matter of time before Eric Schmidt wins an appointment to be some sort of digital czar in the cadre of Washington lapdogs. His credentials as a prevaricator, his expertise in doublethink, and his wallet as a corporate lobbyist qualify him. It gets him away from Alphabet/Google, which is a good thing. In his absence, the executives who remain will do a fine job maintaining the utmost professional standards in safeguarding their customers’ personal data, subject to the EULA.
Just another move in the chess game. The FBI got what it wants out of this:
“According to a report on Monday, U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee leaders are circulating a draft bill that would give federal courts liberal authority to compel tech company compliance with government requests for access to encrypted data.”
We’ll see what the senate does with this. I suppose Apple could comply by giving access to all the encrypted data they want. But decrypting it? Another story. That would undermine CALEA, which specifically prevents the government from imposing constraints on Apple (and others) in the design of their products.
I’m not so sure. FBI thought they had a winning position with their black bishops and rank of pawns, but they miscalculated and got forked by a white knight they had thought powerless. Old-time Soviet grandmasters liked to feint the same way with new young challengers, but they were often surprised by players who stood up to them, and became unsettled by audience approval of the upstarts, all of whom—players and spectators—were observed by the KGB and marked for exclusion from future matches.
“The law enforcement official declined to name the outside party that approached investigators with a possible method for opening the phone”. Hmmm. How many times in real life has some company or someone said “Yeah, I can fix that”, and promptly proceeded to botch the job?
Once that phone is f***ed, there’s no going back. Lol! 😆
Presumably they will test the process on a number of similar iPhone 5Cs to be sure it works before they try it on the target phone.
Of course normal people would do that. We’re talking about the FBI here — their idiocy and incompetence with this iPhone 5C (thus far) does not inspire confidence, does it?
This is entirely because the FBI bloody well knew they’d lose this case and lose it quite visibly and quite suddenly. Their bluff was called, and shown for precisely what it was- fascist obliteration of the founders’ basic tenets. As we’ve now seen, and most probably well knew, terrorists use burner phones for all the really necessary steps. I’d be amazed if there were anything but a few selfies on that iPhone they have.
“The law enforcement official declined to name the outside party that approached investigators with a possible method for opening the phone.”
Let’s hope they didn’t fall for John McAfee’s bullshit. 😹
The word that continues to be at the core of the FBI’s attitude is ‘disingenuous’. I’m waiting for a heavy other shoe to drop out of the sky on we pathetic Chicken Littles of the world. [This is a snarky reference to FBI Director James Comey’s emotion laden blog appeal to our hearts, as opposed to our minds.]
According to Zdziarski, the method used was probably a nand-mirroring technique involving a chip reader/programmer. A brute-force approach, but one that allows you to restore the nand memory if you fail 10 times in a row.
It keeps getting more complicated. Thanks!
This was done only because Comey didn’t want to set a losing precedent in its case vs Apple. Had the public opinion and congress been more sympathetic to their fear mongering, they would never have discovered a way to unlock this phone.
This is merely the government choosing better circumstances before engaging in this battle again.
They lied, nobody has come forward claiming they can crack it. This is a way for the govt. to back out before it is decided in the courts. They cannot afford to lose this case so they decided it just isn’t worth it until they have a better chance of winning.
I think what Apple is saying is “we felt the government was properly using this Act. And we went back and said no, we don’t. We don’t think the government has the authority to do this.” but I could be wrong, I’m just quoting Tim Cook.
I certainly don’t worry about national security for that nation, I’m more concerned about global security myself, and that nation is a threat to it, in my opinion of course.
I wasn’t afraid then, and I am not afraid now. I’ve said it clearly that this was a win win situation for Apple, based on them taking it to the Supremes. If they won in court great, there is some semblance of decorum left in that fifth rate nation. If they lost in court, great it’s an opportunity to move headquarters to a nation of the free and civilized world.
If you look carefully, and this is just my opinion, everyone is having a laugh about this, cause it makes the FBI look stupid and the community does have a sense of humor. The worry will come back after the laughter has subsided but folks aren’t going to be taking you too seriously much longer because you’ve failed to see the humor and the irony. Instead you’ve taken the opportunity to do the troll dance.
Take a deep breath, information about the third party may be forthcoming. I don’t worry about their national security as I’ve said, and my own security. Heck haven’t you noticed that they are in an election year? It’s the safest time for the free and civilized world, they are fighting it out amongst themselves. It’s funny to watch.
Maybe the third party is Apple, so what?
Oh and what about you, why the attack on the community? I mean it’s one thing to be tenacious about one’s principles but you are doing the chicken little boy who cried wolf routine or someone who is wishing to be purposefully antagonistic.
Oh this is a reply to dswe’s post of Tuesday, March 22, 2016 – 12:06 am
The US government probably didn’t blink, Apple likely did.
The government have numerous ways to get businesses and the individuals that runs them do what they want them to do. Most businesses and the individuals that runs them at some point where or are engaged in some type of secretive illegal active or something that’s extremely unethical that if acted upon
could land individuals in jail or results in catastrophic damage to either the business or the individuals that runs them reputations.
Matthew D.Green a professor at Johns Hopkins University and his team recently made a so called discovery of a vulnerability in Apple’s encryption related to iMessage on 03/21/2016.
On the same day the DOJ claim it maybe able to unlock the iPhone and due to this miraculous revelation is seeking a delay their case.
Coincidence?