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posted by janrinok on Thursday March 29 2018, @10:44PM   Printer-friendly

Did the FBI engineer its iPhone encryption court showdown with Apple to force a precedent? Yes and no, say DoJ auditors

The [San Bernardino] attack stoked fears of Islamic extremism within the United States but the shooting has become renowned for a different reason: a showdown between the FBI and Apple over access to Farook's mobile phone. Now a new report [PDF] by the US Department of Justice's internal inspector general, published Tuesday, has blown open the case and indicates the FBI might have been trying to play Apple for a patsy.

The report title is remarkable in itself: "A Special Inquiry Regarding the Accuracy of FBI Statements Concerning its Capabilities to Exploit an iPhone Seized During the San Bernardino Terror Attack Investigation." Which could perhaps be more accurately titled: "Did the FBI lie about not being able to break into a terrorist's phone in an effort to win a legal precedent granting it access to everyone else's digital devices?" And the answer is, remarkably, yes and no.

[...] In the end, the issue was resolved the day before a crunch court hearing when the FBI said it had found a third-party solution to cracking the phone and no longer needed to force Apple to break its own encryption. The timing of that last-minute back down raised suspicions that the FBI had engineered the showdown to create a legal precedent that would force US companies to give it backdoor access to everyone's digital devices now and in the future.

[...] [The] report does flag some very disturbing conversations and inconsistencies that appear to point quite clearly to the fact that the FBI made the most out of the situation and may have done its best not to find out if some parts of the FBI were able to crack the phone in order to pursue its legal case.

Also at Ars Technica


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 30 2018, @04:36PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 30 2018, @04:36PM (#660425)

    that's fine but government orgs have the authority/ability to use force so it kind of makes a difference. i can choose not to enter into a contract with the seditious whores at AT&T, for instance.

  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday March 30 2018, @05:44PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday March 30 2018, @05:44PM (#660448) Journal

    You can only go so far avoiding it.

    For a long time I went without credit card. But then, I just had to accept that it was no longer possible to go completely without; some things you cannot get without it any more (in particular, I had problems to book hotels and flights). I still only use it very sparingly, though.

    Also note that just because a company has no contract with you does not mean it has no power on you. You may not have a contract with AT&T, but AT&T may still be the reason why you don't get a contract with another company under terms to your likings. Or it may be the reason why you get shitty data rates getting data from a site AT&T disapproves, because your connection to that site somewhere passes AT&T's network. Or the fact that you don't have a contract with them might, through connections you don't know about, affect negatively your credit rating.

    The good thing about governments is that they at least have greater difficulties to keep stuff secret than private companies (yes, the government can and does keep stuff secret, including stuff that shouldn't be; however that's nothing compared to the secrecy of private corporations).

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.