The
Justice Department is vacating legal action asking Apple to help unlock an
encrypted iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters, federal
officials said today.
Melanie
Newman, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Justice, said in a statement
today that “it remains a priority for the government to ensure that law
enforcement can obtain crucial digital information to protect national security
and public safety.”
“As the government noted in its filing today, the FBI has now
successfully retrieved the data stored on the San Bernardino terrorist’s iPhone
and therefore no longer requires the assistance from Apple required by this
Court Order. The FBI is currently reviewing the information on the phone,
consistent with standard investigatory procedures,” Newman said.
The
move comes one week after federal officials revealed a third party had come
forward and “demonstrated” a “possible method” to cracking
into a locked iPhone, prompting the U.S. government to postpone a court hearing
scheduled for last Tuesday.
Apple
has been fighting a government order compelling Apple to help create a way for
officials to unlock an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino,
California, shooters.
FBI
Assistant Director in Charge David Bowdich said in a statement Monday night
that the agency “cannot comment on the technical steps that were taken to
obtain the contents of the county-issued iPhone, nor the identity of the third
party that came forward as a result of the publicity generated by the court
order.”
“During
the past week, to include the weekend, extensive testing of the iPhone was done
by highly skilled personnel to ensure that the contents of the phone would
remain intact once technical methods were applied. The full exploitation of the
phone and follow-up investigative steps are continuing,” Bowdich added.
“My law enforcement partners and I made a commitment to the victims of the
12/2 attack in San Bernardino and to the American people that no stone would be
left unturned in this case. We promised to explore every investigative avenue
in order to learn whether the San Bernardino suspects were working with others,
were targeting others, or whether or not they were supported by others.”
“While
we continue to explore the contents of the iPhone and other evidence, these
questions may not be fully resolved, but I am satisfied that we have access to
more answers than we did before and that the investigative process is moving
forward,” he said.
Apple
responded Monday night to the case being dropped, noting that this case
“should never have been brought.”
“From
the beginning, we objected to the FBI’s demand that Apple build a backdoor into
the iPhone because we believed it was wrong and would set a dangerous
precedent. As a result of the government’s dismissal, neither of these
occurred,” Apple said in a statement Monday night.
“We
will continue to help law enforcement with their investigations, as we have
done all along, and we will continue to increase the security of our products
as the threats and attacks on our data become more frequent and more
sophisticated,” the company added. “Apple believes deeply that people
in the United States and around the world deserve data protection, security and
privacy. Sacrificing one for the other only puts people and countries at
greater risk.”
“This
case raised issues which deserve a national conversation about our civil
liberties, and our collective security and privacy. Apple remains committed to
participating in that discussion,” Apple said.
Apple
has been staunch in its position that creating a backdoor for government
officials would undermine the security of millions of users. CEO Tim Cook
kicked off the company’s iPhone SE launch event last week discussing the
encryption fight, adding the company never expected to be “at odds with
our own government.”
“We did not expect to be in this position, at odds with our own
government. But we believe strongly that we have a responsibility to help you
protect your data and protect your privacy. We owe it to our customers and we
owe it to our country,” Cook said.
“Encryption
is meant to be difficult, it is meant to be scrambled,” online safety
expert Robert Siciliano of Intel Security told ABC News. “However, we are
dealing with computer science — and science of any kind can be reverse
engineered. If it can be built by putting together various technology, it can
also be taken apart and its roots exposed.”
