A federal judge has ordered Apple to help the government unlock the iPhone used by one of the shooters who carried out the Dec. 2. San Bernardino, Calif., terrorist attacks after the government said that Apple failed to provide assistance voluntarily.
The order, signed Tuesday by a magistrate judge in Riverside, Calif., does not ask Apple to break the phones encryption, but rather to disable the feature that wipes the data on the phone after 10 incorrect tries at entering a password. That way, the government can try to crack the password using brute force attempting tens of millions of combinations without risking the deletion of the data.
The order comes a week after FBI Director James B. Comey told Congress that the bureau has not been able to open one of the killers phones. It has been two months now, and we are still working on it, he said.
The FBIs efforts may show just how impervious the new technology is to efforts to circumvent it. According to industry officials, Apple cannot unilaterally dismantle or override the 10-tries-and-wipe feature. Only the user or person who controls the phones settings can do so.
However, magistrate judge Sheri Pym noted in her order, Apple can write software that can bypass the feature. Federal prosecutors noted in a memo accompanying the order that the software would affect only the seized phone not any other phone of the same model or using the same operating system.
Source:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...b903ee-d4d9-11e5-9823-02b905009f99_story.html
It will be interesting to see how this plays out as Apple has long maintained that it does not have any special "backdoor" access to the iPhone.
If true, then the government is basically asking a private company to do its forensic work for it for free.
If false, then Apple's whole "everything is encrypted" promise comes crumbling down like a ton of bricks.