In a speech on Monday discussing the criminal investigation into the December 2019 shooting at Pensacola Naval Air Station that saw three U.S. Navy sailors killed and eight others injured, Attorney General William Barr blasted Apple for not providing help in gaining access to the perpetrator’s phones.
At the time of the shooting, Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani possessed two Apple iPhones. During the gunfight with first responders, Alshamrani shot a single round into one iPhone, and the second was damaged in an unknown way.
Barr said the FBI sought and received court authorization based on probable cause to search both phones “in an effort to run down all leads and figure out with whom the shooter with communicating.”
The FBI crime lab was able to fix both damaged phones so they are operational; however, the FBI can’t gain access due to the phones’ encryptions.
“Both phones are engineered to make it virtually impossible to unlock them without the password. It is very important to know with whom and about what the shooter was communicating before he died,” Barr said. “We have asked Apple for their help in unlocking the shooter’s iPhones. So far Apple has not given us any substantive assistance…We call on Apple and other technology companies to help us find a solution so that we can better protect the lives of Americans and prevent future attacks.”
If this sounds familiar, it’s because the FBI and Apple have been battling it out over encryption since the technology company’s 2014 update. iPhones with the 2014 update and later can only be unlocked by the device’s given password—in other words, Apple can not bypass the security, nor can the FBI.
The encryption battle came to an almost-head in the aftermath of the 2015 San Bernardino attack when 14 people were killed and 22 others seriously injured in an Islamic terrorist shooting attack. Two months after the attack, the FBI announced it was unable to unlock the phone of one of the shooters, Syed Rizwan Farook, and asked Apple to create a new version of the phone’s operating system that could be installed on the phone to disable certain security features. Apple declined citing privacy concerns for all users with that kind of backdoor technology; so, the FBI secured a court order mandating Apple to create the new software.
Apple had been working with the FBI on ways to circumvent the encryption previously, but the most promising method did not work due to an error by the Department of Justice.
One day before trial, the FBI announced it had unlocked Farook’s iPhone and withdrew its suit. It was initially reported that Israeli company Cellebrite helped the FBI, but those reports were denied, instead claiming “professional hackers” used a zero-day vulnerability in the iPhone's software to bypass its ten-try password limit.
In March 2018, two years after the encryption was broken, the Los Angeles Times reported that the FBI only found information about work on Farook’s phone, nothing about the plot of the attack.
Based on previous actions and Apple CEO Tim Cook’s hard stance on this subject, its doubtful Apple will help the FBI unlock Alshamrani’s iPhone. In that case, the FBI could file another writ with the court, mandating Apple’s assistance. If the case makes it to trial this time, it would be a precedent-setter. Alternatively, the FBI could turn to professional hackers again, or even a company like Cellebrite.
Photo: (Left) The iPhone shot by the Pensacola shooter and (right) the badly damaged iPhone 5 recovered by the FBI from the shooters car. Credit: FBI