Snowden: FBI's claim it can't unlock the San Bernardino iPhone is 'bullshit'

They can, and have actually fumbled several attempts to do so. Apple was cooperating with the investigation and giving technical advice. Due to a series of really embarrassing technical failures the FBI made their own problem with recovering data from the phone. It's worth noting that this particular phone was a work phone, owned by San Bernadino, and they also had some things set up wrong.

So, a breakdown of failures:

San Bernadino's IT department failed to configure the phone properly to guarantee themselves access to the phone at all times.

FBI failed to get Apple's recommendations about backing up the phone.

FBI instructed San Bernadino IT department to change the password on the phone, without asking Apple, and without backing the data up first. If the FBI had not told them to do this, the phone would have automatically backed up its data to iCloud where Apple could have accessed it.

Apparently no one remembers the password now and the FBI claims they can't get into it.

FBI has other options to get into the phone, like Snowden explained above, but they haven't used them.

FBI is claiming that Apple has helped them in the past, even though this is a different request, and Apple actually was helping.

There are a bunch of really scary problems here. One, breaking encryption for one person breaks it for everyone. Two, Apple doesn't want to create something that will completely undermine their products because the efforts to keep it secure will be insane. Hackers would love a target that breaks open every iPhone. Three, the FBI has proven themselves at best wildly incompetent, so Apple doesn't want to give the ability to crack IOS to them either. A leak would seriously hurt them as a company, and who would trust someone with that when even a damn password wasn't managed properly?

/r/news Thread Parent Link - theguardian.com