Surprise, surprise the FBI’s investigation into the San Bernadino shooters Iphone is nearly complete and “so far nothing of real significance has been found” – according to a statements with CBS News. But anyone with a brain knows finding information in the shooters phone was never the purpose of this case. Just as with the Patriot Act, the FBI “let no crisis go to waste” and used terrorism as an excuse to strip away another layer of privacy to expand upon domestic spying capabilities. Mission accomplished, the FBI now has the ability to unlock any phone in the United States and has the courts/laws on their side to do so.
The FBI went on the stress that the investigation is still on going, meaning that FBI is tracing the records of phones of the phones connected to the shooters phone. If you remember, the government has the right to track phones to the 3rd degree. Meaning that when a warrant is issued for one phone, any number attached to that phone can be traced and any numbers attached to those numbers can also legally be traced. This is what is refereed to as the third degree. This is the same law used by the NSA to gain access to the personal record of over 300 million Americans as AnonHQ highlighted in an article last year: http://anonhq.com/41000-2/
According to FBI Director James Comey, despite having the ability to crack Iphones, the FBI will not share this information. In a statement with CBS News Comey went on to explain why when he said “If we tell Apple, they’re going to fix it and we’re back where we started. As silly as it may sound, we may end up there.” As a recent report by The Hacker News has pointed out, to combat the FBI’s encroachment upon civil rights, Apple has now hired one of the worlds foremost experts on secure messaging systems – Frederic Jacobs. The goal is to fully encrypt Apple-iCloud backups to make it even harder for law enforcement to access data stored on its servers.
Last month the FBI dropped its case with Apple, but more recently Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Whats App have all teamed together to strengthen security against government intrusion. As of Thursday April 15th, Microsoft has officially sued the US Department of Justice for unconstitutional use of search warrants used to obtain information on civilians. Meanwhile the FBI has made no quarrels about the fact they will continue to use the US court system to end encryption rights.
Sources: CBS News, The Hacker News
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My guess is Apple’s geniuses are already well on their way to identifying the same security flaws and have already or will soon enough fix it. Maybe they even paid the same hackers he FBI paid; wouldn’t that be grand?