Feds manage to break into Florida shooter’s iPhone

May 19, 2020 03:53 GMT  ·  By

The FBI has managed to hack into the iPhone used by the shooter at the naval air station in Pensacola, Florida, something which was considered as critical for the investigation, and now the Feds are using this occasion to restart their public offensive against Apple.

FBI director Christopher Wray says breaking into the iPhone happened with “effectively no help” from Apple, suggesting the Cupertino-based tech giant refused to provide assistance in unlocking the device.

Apple has repeatedly refused to break into its own devices, describing a potential hack as a national security threat that would eventually expose everyone with an iPhone.

Attorney General William Barr has also criticized Apple for not helping the FBI in a public statement.

“Apple has made a business and marketing decision to design its phones in a way that only the user can unlock the contents no matter what the circumstances. In cases like this, where the user is a terrorist, or in other cases where the user is a violent criminal, a human trafficker, a child predator, Apple's decision has dangerous consequences for the public safety and the national security and is in my judgment unacceptable,” Barr says.

Apple: Not true

But that’s simply not true, Apple says in a public statement released earlier today. The company says it actually helped the investigators with all the data in its possession, including the information that was stored in the cloud.

“We provided every piece of information available to us, including ‌iCloud‌ backups, account information and transactional data for multiple accounts, and we let continuous and ongoing technical and investigative support to FBI offices in Jacksonville, Pensacola, and New York over the months since,” Apple says.

The company claims this is just another attempt to reignite talks about backdoors, explaining that such ideas are actually a threat to the encryption available on smartphones.

“The false claims made about our company are an excuse to weaken encryption and other security measures that protect millions of users and our national security,” Apple says.

Apple keeps insisting that building a backdoor just for the police is pretty much impossible because sooner or later, such code would still end up in the wrong hands, eventually compromising the security of all iPhones out there.