HOW TO FBI AND APPLE SEEMINGLY HEADED TOWARD ANOTHER

Apple is heading for another confrontation with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), as the agency revealed this morning that it had sought help to recover data from the iPhone in a recent case. Apple has so far refused to unlock the devices.

These devices belong to the gunman in a firing at a naval base in Pensacola, Florida, last month. Lt. Mohammed Saeed Al-Shamrani of the Royal Saudi Air Force shot down three soldiers in the attack: Lt. Joshua Watson, 23, pilot 19-year-old, pilot Mohammad Hatham, and 21-year-old pilot Cameron Walters. Al-Shamrani was killed at the scene.

FBI general counsel Dana Puente said federal investigators had not yet been able to use the Shamrani iPhone because they were all locked and encrypted.

In 2014, Apple began manufacturing cryptography on every iPhone sold. To unlock the device, the user must enter a six-digit (or more) passcode. Apple does not know this passcode because the encryption key is stored on the device itself, not in the cloud.

Law enforcement officers may have collected the phone after it was switched off, or perhaps biometrics such as Touch ID or Face ID were used to access the phone. We know that at least one phone was shot and destroyed before the shooter was killed.

Once the phone is idle for a long time, or loses power, the user must enter a six-digit passcode (or more) to access the device. Unfortunately for the FBI, this passcode is not available to Apple, as it is stored on the device itself and not in the cloud.

In a statement, Apple said it had given the FBI “all the data we have”.

For its part, Apple regularly obeys court orders to distribute data stored on its servers. However, this data usually belongs to the iCloud group and does not include anything from the phone’s encryption key.

But although it does not contain information that allows the FBI to unlock the iPhone – unless the user is stupid enough to store their passcode in notes, for example – the data provided by Apple is nothing is. For example, an iCloud backup-enabled user can provide access to the library of photos, videos, and any file stored in the new Apple file system, among other things.

If all of this sounds familiar, it should be. In 2016, the FBI requested Apple’s help in unlocking an iPhone belonging to Syed Radwan Farooq, a San Bernardino shooter who killed 14 people in 2015.

The FBI requested Apple to unlock the device, the iPhone 5C. Apple told the FBI that this could not happen, because the devices were encrypted based on the user’s passcode, not information stored in the cloud or data that they might otherwise have access to. The confrontation eventually led to court orders, Apple refused to comply, and eventually a congressional hearing.

Before the second congressional hearing, the Justice Department, with the help of an anonymous third party, made a motion to cancel the process after claiming that it had opened the phone on its own.

Edward Snowden, who knows a thing or something about such things, said the FBI’s claim that an iPhone cannot be hacked without help from Apple is “nonsense.”

Nonsense or not, the case went away and we mostly forgot about it. The Justice Department did not find the precedent it wanted, and it did not force Apple to help the FBI break the security of its users. History, however, often repeats itself.

Here, we find ourselves ahead again for another confrontation between the FBI and Apple. The FBI, it seems, wants to work through backdoor in consumer devices, and Apple, for its part, has retreated.

According to New York Times sources, the FBI does not require Apple to create back doors in user devices. This, however, is the logic of meaning. The FBI has repeatedly claimed that it seeks tailgates on only one device, not all devices. It is worth noting that there are hundreds and possibly thousands of devices that are tied up in court cases across the country as we speak.

As Apple previously reported, the FBI wants a backdoor build needed to obtain data, setting a dangerous precedent for user privacy around the world. It is also said that a backdoor cannot be made into a single device without compromising all other devices if an exploiter finds its way into the wild.