Apple has until Feb. 26 to comply with the Department of Justice order to assist the FBI in unlocking an iPhone connected to the December 2015 San Bernardino shooting, but judging from Apple’s recent update to the open letter they published Feb. 16, it seems like both sides are refusing to budge from their respective positions.
FBI Director James Comey published a blog post late Sunday night about the issue on Lawfare, writing, “Although this case is about the innocents attacked in San Bernardino, it does highlight that we have awesome new technology that creates a serious tension between two values we all treasure: privacy and safety.”
“The particular legal issue is actually quite narrow. The relief we seek is limited and its value increasingly obsolete because the technology continues to evolve,” Comey writes. “We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist's passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a decade to guess correctly. That's it. We don't want to break anyone's encryption or set a master key loose on the land. I hope thoughtful people will take the time to understand that.”
The iCloud account password connected to the iPhone in question was reset in the early days of the investigation by San Bernardino County, who owns the iPhone, seemingly at the behest of the FBI. This complicated matters greatly, as the iPhone is designed to either wipe itself clean after ten wrong passcode guesses or to require exponentially longer amounts of time between attempts with each wrong guess.
According to anonymous Apple executives who spoke to Ars Technica and Gizmodo, if the iPhone had been allowed to back itself up to iCloud, Apple would have been able to provide the data the FBI is currently seeking without creating a new version of iOS that would essentially allow a backdoor into iOS’s encryption measures.
In a statement to Ars Technica , the FBI said that, “the reset of the iCloud account password does not impact Apple’s ability to assist with the court order under the All Writs Acts.” The statement went on to say, “Through previous testing, we know that direct data extraction from an iOS devices often provides more data than an iCloud backup contains . . . there might be information on the phone that would not be accessible without Apple’s assistance as required by the All Writs Act order, since the iCloud backup does not contain everything on an iPhone.”
The All Writs Act, first introduced in 1789 but passed into law in its current form in 1911, essentially means, in the words of The New Yorker, that “judges can tell people [or corporations] to follow the law, but they have to do so in a way that, in itself, respects the law . . . If [the government] can tell Apple, which has been accused of no wrongdoing, to sit down and write a custom operating system for it, what else could it do?”
Bloomberg recently published details about a memo from senior national security officials that ordered “agencies across the U.S. government to find ways to counter encryption software and gain access to the most heavily protected user data on the most secure consumer devices, including Apple Inc.’s iPhone.”
Apple followed up on Tim’s Cook open letter regarding the FBI’s request to help the agency bypass the iPhone security by posting a FAQ about the issue on its website and issuing an all-hands memo to employees.
The FAQ, visible here, answers questions such as, “Has Apple unlocked iPhones for law enforcement in the past?” and, “Is it technically possible to do what the government has ordered?” For these two, Apple answered no and yes respectively.
The all-hands memo, reprinted on Buzzfeed, is signed by Cook and personally thanks Apple employees for speaking out in support of the letter he published. It goes on to encourage employees to read the aforementioned FAQ before further underlining Apple’s official position on the issue by calling on the government to “withdraw its demands under the All Writs Act and, as some in Congress have proposed, form a commission or other panel of experts on intelligence, technology and civil liberties to discuss the implications for law enforcement, national security, privacy and personal freedoms.”
Multiple Internet-focused companies have come out in support of Apple’s stance, including Google, Twitter, Facebook and Mozilla.
Reuters is reporting that some victims of the San Bernardino attack are planning to file a legal brief in support of the Department of Justice order, in the hope of forcing Apple’s hand in the matter. Represented by a former federal judge, Stephen Larson spoke on behalf of those victims, saying, "They were targeted by terrorists, and they need to know why, how this could happen."
