14 DAY TRIAL // The FBI still doesn’t want to disclose the method employed to break into the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino attackers and says, through the voice of general counsel James Baker, that “it’s too early” to tell whether any useful information is on the device or not.
The senior FBI official said during the International Association of Privacy Professional that the investigation continued in the San Bernardino case and engineers were still analyzing data found on the iPhone.
When asked whether the agency has any plan to inform Apple about the way it hacked the iPhone, Baker revealed that this issue was still being discussed and a decision would only be made after every single bit of information on the device got closely inspected.
“We’re now doing an analysis of that data, as we would in any other type of criminal terrorism investigation. That means we would follow logical leads,” he was quoted as saying by WSJ.
“We are discussing a whole range of issues associated with the solution. It raises a whole range of issues in terms of how we’re going to handle it going forward. Normally we don’t have such detailed real-time public discussions of precise surveillance tools… There’s a significant amount of novelty to us.”
Skepticism about data on the iPhone
One of the reasons privacy advocates opposed to FBI’s intention to break into the San Bernardino iPhone was simply because it was very unlikely for the organization to find any useful data on the device. Many claimed that terrorists wouldn’t leave any data on these devices, especially when they’re planning attacks such as the one in San Bernardino in late 2015.
The husband of the San Bernardino shooting survivor Anies Kondoker explained in a letter published by Apple in its defense against the FBI that iPhones given to employees by the County aren’t used for anything else than work-related stuff, especially given the fact that local authorities can track pretty much everything on these devices.
“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,” he said.
In the meantime, what’s more worrying for Apple and its customers is that the FBI found a way to hack iPhones and the company can’t do anything about it unless the agency provides more information on it.