14 DAY TRIAL // The FBI managed to break into the iPhone owned by one of the San Bernardino shooters after a several-month-long dispute with Apple, but it appears that the bureau struggled to do this for nothing, as no useful data was found on the device.
A report by CBS News and citing people close to the matter reveals that the FBI found “nothing of real significance” on the device, but the investigators continue their analysis of the data and hope that something that could connect the shooter to other terrorists would be discovered.
Apple hasn’t yet issued a comment on this, but the company was one of the parties who explained that breaking into the device is a waste of time because the terrorist most likely used a different phone for planning the attacks.
County’s iPhones
Furthermore, Apple turned to the husband of the San Bernardino shooting survivor Anies Kondoker to explain that such devices aren’t used for anything but work-related stuff. County employees received iPhones from local authorities, and this was the case of the San Bernardino attacker too.
“This was common knowledge among my wife and other employees. Why then would someone store vital contacts related to an attack on a phone they knew the county had access to? They destroyed their personal phones after the attack. And I believe they did that for a reason,” Salihin Kondoker explained in a letter submitted to Apple and then published online by the company.
Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the attackers at San Bernardino, received an iPhone from the county, and since the FBI hasn’t yet found any useful data, he probably used another phone to plan the attacks.
And even if it hacked the iPhone for nothing, the FBI is still not willing to tell Apple how it did it, so the company’s phones are still believed to be vulnerable to this exploit unless a patch is developed.