After a partially unanswered Freedom of Information Act request, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is suing the FBI to learn more about the federal agency’s Electronic Device Analysis Unit.
Publicly available court documents have referred to the Electronic Device Analysis Unit (EDAU) a handful of times, even indicating that the team within the FBI has already acquired software that can unlock and decrypt information from locked mobile phones. Now, the ACLU wants to know more about the EDAU and its capabilities.
Almost exactly a year ago, Forbes uncovered an October 2019 search warrant that strongly suggests the FBI can extract data from the latest and most secure iPhones. The warrant stems from a case against Baris Ali Koch, who was accused of helping his convicted brother flee the country by providing him with his own ID documents and lying to the police. According to the warrant, FBI investigators in Ohio used Grayshift’s GrayKey to draw data from an Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max.
Grayshift is an Atlanta-based company founded by an ex-Apple security engineer. It has gained popularity in the past few years, signing lucrative contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Secret Service.
Despite the possible use of GrayKey, former Attorney General William Barr demanded multiple times over the course of his tenure that Apple and other technology companies help law enforcement access locked iPhones, including the one belonging to Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, who killed three people in a terrorist attack on the Naval Air Station Pensacola in 2019.
Barr and other federal government officials have pushed for Apple and other mobile phone manufacturers to build encryption backdoors into their phones that would allow easy law enforcement access.
The ACLU’s lawsuit, filed last month in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, comes after the FBI declined to turn over records in response to a Freedom of Information Act request relating to the EDAU and its technological capabilities. Instead, the federal agency issued what’s known as a Glomar response—a refusal to either confirm or deny the existence of any records pertaining to the EDAU in the first place.
According to the ACLU, the problem with the FBI’s Glomar response is that there are already public documents—such as the October 2019 search warrant referenced earlier—that point to the existence of the EDAU.
“The FBI itself has made clear that it is attempting to access and decrypt personal electronic devices, so the claim that it can’t even acknowledge whether these records exist is implausible,” the ACLU said in a statement.
Specifically, the ACLU lawsuit asks a federal court to intervene and order the DOJ and the FBI to turn over all responsive documents pertaining to the EDAU.
“We’re demanding the government release records concerning any policies applicable to the EDAU, its technological capabilities to unlock or access electronic devices, and its requests for, purchases of, or uses of software that could enable it to bypass encryption,” the ACLU said.
The ACLU also points out in the lawsuit that the FBI posted a job opening in August for a position involving forensic extractions and data recovery from locked and damaged devices.