In a last-minute filing with a federal court in California, the Department of Justice got the court to delay a hearing over Apple's refusal to comply with an order from the FBI to hack an iPhone, and further asked the judge to stay an unprecedented court order that would have forced Apple to cooperate. The FBI now says it can unlock the phone without Apple's assistance.
Melanie Newman, a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice, said in a statement sent to Ars that the government only learned of this new unlock technique this weekend.
"We must first test this method to ensure that it doesn’t destroy the data on the phone, but we remain cautiously optimistic," she wrote. "That is why we asked the court to give us some time to explore this option."
In a Monday evening call with reporters, Apple lawyers told Ars that they had absolutely no information on the government's claims.
Apple attorneys also said on the call that the company was engaged in a "constant battle" with those that would attempt to circumvent the company's security flaws. They added that the company hopes to better understand what the supposed vulnerability is, and if the case continues, the firm will insist in court on knowing everything possible about it.
This likely demonstrates that Justice believed that Apple has a very good case, and its own is a little weak. Andrew Crocker, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars Technica that "they couldn’t say in good faith that they had tried all the other alternatives," and that would have been brought out in this hearing. Apple clearly has the ability and the intent to take this case as far as it needs to go, all the way to the Supreme Court.
For its part, Justice is insisting that this supposedly brand-new discovery that they can break into the phone after all means that this "was always about getting into a dead terrorist's phone. […] It's always been about this phone." Of course it hasn't always been about this one phone, as lawmakers and law enforcement have long-since conceded. This was certainly about setting the precedent to allow the government to continue to break proprietary security measures by any company, on any device. Whether or not the FBI really has found a hack that can be used on this one phone remains to be seen, but they have determined that they needed to come back from the brink on this particular fight.