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San Bernardino Police: Reasonably Good Chance Nothing Of Value On Shooter's iPhone (businessinsider.com)
San Bernardino police chief, Jarrod Burguan, who was part of the investigation into the two shooters who killed 14 during a mass shooting event last December, says there probably isn't any useful information on Syed Farook's government-issued phone. "I'll be honest with you, I think there is a reasonably good chance that there is nothing of any value on the phone," Burguan said. Burguan is siding with the FBI, though, which is seeking to compel Apple to build custom software to allow law enforcement to extract data from Farook's phone. "This is an effort to leave no stone unturned in the investigation," Burguan told NPR. "To allow this phone to sit there, and not make an effort to get the information or the data that may be inside of that phone is simply not fair to the victims or the families."
They already know there is nothing on it but selfies but they want to get people used to the idea of 'Feds' extracting data from people's iPhones, or else just give would-be terr'ists the idea that their data is secure, when Apple has in fact implemented a backdoor years ago
This could be done without the owner's consent, and shipped to everyone. Apple does not want to do that at all costs. And you could disable auto-updates, knowing that a device without updates is not secure. So you would be pwned either way, likely.
The FBI is willing to allow Apple to send an update to this specific phone, in an Apple lab, while Apple retains custody of the phone, as long as the data on the phone can be copied and given to the FBI.
In this case, the owner cannot consent and the phone is prosecutorial evidence, so the owner need not consent. And if a warrant were issued to compel Apple to send out an *existing* backdoor to gather evidence, Apple might have no choice but comply, with a probable gag order so the user is not notified.
Ergo, Apple wants to avoid creating this backdoor in the first place, so they can legit claim it doesn't exist for future requests.
The fun part of this is that the prosecution is willing to burn this bridge, and encourage Apple to redesign the security so this can't happen in the future. Capturing an Apple master signing key wouldn't be enough to make a backdoor this way, if Apple succeeds. Knowing in advance that the evidence would probably not help makes it head-scratching that they would go so far to basically declare in public what their capability is for reclaiming encrypted data.
Now everyone knows:
1) Disabling cloud sync means the data is on the device only
2) Apple currently won't make a backdoor
3) Feds don't have a backdoor
4) Future phones will likely not even be able to be backdoored
This is very much Snowden level releasing of national security secrets to enemies, only it's being done in public for no gain. Which makes it really fishy, unless some prosecutor really believed that this request would result in no change in technology nor blowback from the tech world. Which is the opposite claimed by everything about the Snowden files, so he can't claim ignorance. Given that the tech world moved to encryption because of Snowden's revelations as well as intrusions and data dumps, that's exceedingly bizarre.