Apple has called on the government to withdraw its demand that the company create a backdoor software hack to retrieve data from an iPhone seized from one of the San Bernardino shooters. The company is instead calling for a commission to study encryption issues, and pledging cooperation with such a commission. Apple CEO Tim Cook also explained the company's position in an email to employees.
"We have no tolerance or sympathy for terrorists," Cook wrote in an early morning email addressed to the Apple "Team." ''When they commit unspeakable acts like the tragic attacks in San Bernardino, we work to help the authorities pursue justice for the victims."
But he reiterated the company's position that to hack the San Bernardino gunman's phone would ultimately risk "security of hundreds of millions of law-abiding people."
Meanwhile, FBI director James Comey is dialing up the fear and saying the FBI "can't look the survivors in the eye, or ourselves in the mirror, if we don't follow this lead." What Comey has not explained is this: Why the FBI immediately closed off a simple means of obtaining that data as soon as it was in custody. The phone was Syed Rizwan Farook's work phone, and his employer, the San Bernardino Health Department, owned the phone and controlled the password.
It turns out that the FBI requested that the Health Department change the password early on in the investigation. According to senior Apple executive, if the password hadn't been changed, they could have accessed a backup of the information the government is seeking.
The Apple executives said the company had been in regular discussions with the government since early January, and that it proposed four different ways to recover the information the government is interested in without building a backdoor. One of those methods would have involved connecting the iPhone to a known Wi-Fi network and triggering an iCloud backup that might provide the FBI with information stored to the device between October 19th and the date of the incident.
Apple sent trusted engineers to attempt that method, the executives said, but they were unable to do it. It was then that they discovered that the Apple ID password associated with the iPhone had been changed sometime after the terrorist’s death — within 24 hours of the government taking possession of the phone. By changing the password, the government foreclosed its ability to obtain a fresh copy of the most recent device data via this back-up-to-known-wifi method.
That would have been a simple approach to getting the data on that individual phone, one that Apple was more than willing to facilitate. Why the FBI wanted the password change and that history lost hasn't been explained.
But the fact remains that now the FBI is demanding a fix that could be—and probably would be—used over and over again on all iPhones. That would set a precedent not just for Apple, but for all device makers and not just for this phone, but potentially for any smart device.