Barr Asks Apple to Unlock iPhones of Pensacola Gunman

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/us/politics/pensacola-shooting-iphones.html

Barr Asks Apple to Unlock iPhones of Pensacola Gunman
The request set up a collision between law enforcement and big technology firms in the latest battle over privacy and security.
By Katie Benner
Jan. 13, 2020

WASHINGTON — Attorney General William P. Barr declared on Monday that a deadly shooting last month at a naval air station in Pensacola, Fla., was an act of terrorism, and he asked Apple in an unusually high-profile request to provide access to two phones used by the gunman.

Mr. Barr’s appeal was an escalation of an ongoing fight between the Justice Department and Apple pitting personal privacy against public safety.

“This situation perfectly illustrates why it is critical that the public be able to get access to digital evidence,” Mr. Barr said, calling on Apple and other technology companies to find a solution and complaining that Apple has provided no “substantive assistance.”

Apple has given investigators materials from the iCloud account of the gunman, Second Lt. Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, a member of the Saudi air force training with the American military, who killed three sailors and wounded eight others on Dec. 6. But the company has refused to help the F.B.I. open the phones themselves, which would undermine its claims that its phones are secure.

Justice Department officials said that they need access to Mr. Alshamrani’s phones to see messages from encrypted apps like Signal or WhatsApp to determine whether he had discussed his plans with others at the base and whether he was acting alone or with help.

[dewsgirl]

1. And he knows they won't...didnt we go through this with

some of the evidence Mueller collected? I may be wrong here.

[jmowreader]

2. Apple won't do it, and I don't think they even can

A couple years ago Gavin Seim did something I don’t remember, but it was bad. The State of Washington asked Apple to unlock Seim’s iPhone and Apple said they couldn’t do it.

I suspect someone could just “drag” his phone - connect it to a computer and input six-digit codes until the thing opened - but that would take 20 minutes’ work for a good programmer to set up, and none of them are going to work for the First Tyrant.

[dalton99a]

4. They can't access locked devices running iOS 8 and later, even with a warrant

https://www.wired.com/story/the-time-tim-cook-stood-his-ground-against-fbi/
The FBI Wanted a Back Door to the iPhone. Tim Cook Said No

iOS 8 added much stronger encryption than had been seen before in smartphones. It encrypted all the user’s data—phone call records, messages, photos, contacts, and so on—with the user’s passcode. The encryption was so strong, not even Apple could break it. Security on earlier devices was much weaker, and there were various ways to break into them, but Apple could no longer access locked devices running iOS 8, even if law enforcement had a valid warrant. “Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data,” the company wrote on its website. “So it’s not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running iOS 8.”

[htuttle]

3. I honestly don't think they can

Well technically, they could remove the lock by inputting the wrong password 10 times, but it would wipe the phone in the process.

It is actually possible to build a device so secure that the builder of it can't break into it without eliminating the data that it is holding.

That's why they have much more luck just getting the synced data from the phone from Apple iCloud.

[bitterross]

5. Why doesn't he just ask his Russian benefactors? Or the Chinese?

Putin's toy, Trump, should just ask his master to de-crypt it. If anyone has the tools for that already it's Russia - or China. Hell, China could be putting chips on the phones during manufacturing that allow them to capture everything - for all we know.

[maxsolomon]

6. there's only 9,999 possible codes

or 999,999 on the new phones.