Why the Department of Justice Keeps Asking Apple to Unlock iPhones – Medium

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If youve been following the news much this week, one story, in particular, may have inspired a sense of deja vu. William Barr, President Donald Trumps current Attorney General appeared in front of cameras alongside FBI Director Christopher Wray to explain how after several months of tinkering, they had managed to successfully crack the phone of the shooter and apparent Al-Qaeda affiliate Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani.

A quick recap of that shooting. Back in December of last year, Alshamrani walked onto a naval air station in Pensacola, Florida at around 7:00 am. Armed with a 9mm Glock handgun and several magazines of ammunition, Alshamrani roamed two floors of the building and opened fire, killing three and injuring eight more. About an hour after the shooting began, Alshamrani was shot and killed by Escambia County sheriff deputies.

On January 13, 2020, the FBI officially categorized the shooting an alleged act of terror, and suspected it was motivated by, jihadist ideology. From there, a full-blown investigation was launched attempting to discover any link between the gunman and larger terrorist groups. Central to that investigation were the contents of two phones an iPhone 5 and an iPhone 7 Plus which Alshamrani had on him during the time of the attack. Both were locked behind a passcode.

In a series of events that would eerily resemble the response to the 2015 San Bernardino shooting, FBI officials asked Apple to step in and unlock the phones. As was the case then, Apple refused, saying they do not possess the ability to bypass their phones local encryption even if they wanted to.

Both of the phones according to Wired, were badly damaged during the shooting and it was initially unclear whether or not any of their contents could be received. Eventually, after weeks of tinkering, the FBI managed to power on and unlock both phones, but no thanks to Apple. Heres FBI Director Ray explaining the situation.

We canvassed every partner out there and every company that might have had a solution to access these phones. None did, Wray said. So we did it ourselves. Unfortunately the technique that we developed is not a fix for our broader Apple problem. Its a pretty limited application.

In varying press conferences and interviews, both Wray and Attorney General Barr blasted into Apple claiming they refused to help law enforcement. But thats not exactly accurate. According to Recode, Apple did provide the FBI additional materials, going as far as to provide them with iCloud backups of Alshamranis phones. The company stopped short of agreeing to create a supposed back door for law enforcement to bypass encryption, citing the same concerns it had back in 2016.

It is because we take our responsibility to national security so seriously that we do not believe in the creation of a backdoor one which will make every device vulnerable to bad actors who threaten our national security and the data security of our customers, Apple said this week in a statement sent to Wired. There is no such thing as a backdoor just for the good guys, and the American people do not have to choose between weakening encryption and effective investigations.

That argument fell on deaf ears within the US government. Following the announcement of the FBIs successful iPhone cracking, Barr said he was tired of working with Apple and called for legislative solutions to force Apple to comply in future cases.

The bottom line: Our national security cannot remain in the hands of big corporations who put dollars over lawful access and public safety, Barr said. The time has come for a legislative solution.

While back in 2016 the FBIs main point of contention was a potential inability to bypass iPhone encryption, the main issue now revolves around time and financial cost. During his press conferences, FBI director Wray criticized Apple for supposedly costing the agency valuable time time he claims which let co-conspirators delete evidence.

Public servants, already swamped with important things to do to protect the American people and toiling through a pandemic, with all the risk and hardship that entails had to spend all that time just to access the evidence we got court-authorized search warrants for months ago, Wray said.

And even though the FBI did manage to break into the phone, they are still demanding backdoors into phones because they claim their technique may not work in future cases.

The technique that we developed is not a fix for our broader Apple problem; its of pretty limited application, Wray said.

While its surely frustrating for law enforcement to jump through extra hurdles to gather information, most of the governments rationale for requiring Apple to install backdoors into all its devices fails to hold up under security. For one thing, its unclear why these particular phones in questions were difficult to crack in the first place.

As Chris Welch explains in The Verge, both of the devices here are older models with known vulnerabilities out there making them susceptible to passcode breaking. Several major companies, (most notably Cellebrite) claim they can break the passcodes of any iPhone and have been assisting the FBI for years. Why it took weeks to crack an iPhone 5, which is nearly a decade old (thats Flinstone car in tech years) remains bafflingly unclear.

Its also telling that the government has shifted its language away from saying they cant unlock the phones, to now saying they cant unlock them quickly. The goal post keeps shifting, but the central issue remains the same: any full-scale backdoor would subvert privacy, not just for criminals, but for the billions of innocent people using smartphones every day.

This all follows a familiar trend as ACLU staff attorney Brett Max Kaufman told me in an emailed statement.

Every time theres a traumatic event requiring investigation into digital devices, the Justice Department loudly claims that it needs backdoors to encryption, and then quietly announces it actually found a way to access information without threatening the security and privacy of the entire world. The boy who cried wolf has nothing on the agency that cried encryption.

The timing of the governments announcement is telling here. The House of Representatives is getting ready to vote on a controversial new bill called the EARN IT ACT. While carefully avoiding using the word, encryption, the EARN IT ACT would grant Attorney General Barr the ability to compel tech companies and service providers to provide backdoors into devices.

The bill masquerades as an attempt to reign in child exploitation online, but as multiple writers and privacy advocates have expounded on ad nauseam, the bills purported solution would jeopardize the privacy of everyone who owns a phone, not just child predators. Its no exaggeration to say that if the EARN IT ACT passes, it would represent the most severe invasion of American civil liberties since the Patriot Act.

For decades, encryption has been a cat and mouse game between personal privacy and national security. While it would be one thing if standard encryption was exponentially evolving without any checks, the recent FBI example is clear evidence proving the contrary. The government can break into iPhones and it is getting better and better at it. While private companies shouldnt be able to prevent law enforcement from doing their jobs, they shouldnt be compelled to make investigations a walk in the park either. If the price for greater universal privacy protections means police need to spend extra hours doing police work, then so be it.

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Why the Department of Justice Keeps Asking Apple to Unlock iPhones - Medium