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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Did the FBI engineer its iPhone encryption court showdown with Apple to force a precedent? Yes and no, say DoJ auditors [theregister.co.uk]

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 [justice.gov] [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 [theregister.co.uk] 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 [arstechnica.com].

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