The FBI is asking Apple Inc. to help unlock two iPhones that investigators think were owned by Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, the man believed to have carried out the shooting attack that killed three people last month at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida.
In a letter sent late Monday to Apple’s general counsel, the FBI said that although it has court permission to search the contents of the phones, both are password-protected. “Investigators are actively engaging in efforts to ‘guess’ the relevant passcodes but so far have been unsuccessful,” it said.
The letter, from FBI General Counsel Dana Boente, said officials have sought help from other federal agencies, as well as from experts in foreign countries and “familiar contacts in the third-party vendor community.” That may be a reference to the undisclosed vendor that helped the FBI open the locked phone of Syed Farook, the gunman who attacked a city meeting in San Bernardino, California, in 2015…
Apple on Monday said the company had been working with the government.
“We have the greatest respect for law enforcement and have always worked cooperatively to help in their investigations,” Apple said in a statement. “When the FBI requested information from us relating to this case a month ago, we gave them all of the data in our possession and we will continue to support them with the data we have available.”
MacDailyNews Take: So, it sounds like the same situation as usual: Apple believes security shouldn’t come at the expense of individual privacy, so the iPhones are off limits, unless some third-party can crack them (CelleBrite, for example). Apple will give iCloud data after receiving a valid law enforcement request. More info: Apple’s Law Enforcement Support Program. Would that terrorists had worse taste in phones.
So, since the iCloud data is encrypted at rest even, what data can they turn over – that implies that Apple has master access to encrypted data.
Not necessarily. Apple can provide the encrypted blob. The alphabet soup has to provide the the time and energy to decrypt it.