![]() The case will resume tomorrow, hours after Apple's spring press conference today, where it is expected to announce a new iPhone. However, Perino stated in her declaration that the FBI would not have been able to access the phone's data regardless of whether the reset occurred or not. ![]() ![]() Referring to claims by the FBI that it had "exhausted all other practical options" to get into the iPhone 5c at the heart of the dispute, the WSJ said: "Now we learn the FBI, far from exhausting all other practical options, had been pursuing such non-Apple leads all along."Ĭomey issued a strong rebuttal, saying the WSJ was "simply wrong to assert that the FBI and the Justice Department lied about ability to access the San Bernardino killer's phone". "The San Bernardino case was not about trying to send a message or set a precedent it was and is about fully investigating a terrorist attack," Comey wrote in a letter responding to the WSJ's editorial, in which the paper accused the FBI of " by saying the Apple case is about one phone". : FBI director James Comey has slapped down assertions made by the Wall Street Journal that the agency's court tussle with Apple is part of a wider strategy to establish a legal precedent forcing phone makers to break their own encryption. withdrawn), however, the FBI has apparently made the method used to crack the phone "classified", according to the Guardian.This effort is ostensibly to keep iPhones secure from criminal hackers, but also to keep Apple or any security researchers from reverse-engineering it and then creating a patch. The most obvious of these is "How did they do it?" - if the case had progressed in court, Apple's lawyers said they would have demanded to talk to the mysterious third party and find out everything they could about the exploit. Another case is reportedly already developing due to Apple refusing to obey a warrant from the Massachusetts federal court to unlock an iPhone belonging to a "gangster".īut last week it saidan "outside source" - reported to be Israeli mobile data forensics firm Cellebrite - had come forward and demonstrated a method to extract the data safely.ĭrawing the case to a close now has advantages for both sides: the FBI will not be forced to face difficult questions about privacy and security in Congress while Apple's engineers will not be forced to break their own encryption, something that could have cast a long shadow over consumer confidence.īut this abrupt end to the case also raises a number of questions. This is not the end for Apple's court battles with the US government, however. The spokewoman refused to disclose who provided the password to unlock the phone. "In this case, an individual provided the department with the passcode to the locked phone at issue." In that case, the FBI managed to crack the iPhone 5c with help from an unnamed third-party, paying it $1.3 million.Ī DoJ spokeswoman, Emily Pierce, said in a statement to Bloomberg: "These cases have never been about setting a court precedent. This case was similar, but not directly related, to a high-profile case concerning the iPhone of a San Bernardino gunman. It had admitted that it had not exhausted all other avenues to open the device earlier this month. The Department of Justice (DoJ) has now dropped the case against Apple, sending a four-sentence letter to the judge explaining that it had obtained a password to unlock a New York drug dealer's iPhone by hand.
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