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FBI Should Try To Unlock iPhone Without Apple's Help, Lawmaker Says (csoonline.com)

Posted by timothy on from the seems-reasonable dept.

itwbennett writes: Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican and former car-alarm entrepreneur, has suggested that the FBI try unlocking mass shooter Syed Rizwan Farook by copying the hard drive and running password attempts until they find the correct password. Bruce Sewell, Apple's senior vice president and general counsel, said during a congressional hearing that, although the company doesn't know the condition of the shooter's iPhone, Issa's approach may work.

3 of 254 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This guy over here.... by halivar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    He called it a hard-drive, not a hard-disk. Honestly, we're splitting hairs about shit literally no one that does not frequent technology blogs gives a crap about. This is especially true because the HDD/SSD distinction has no bearing on the merits of his suggestion.

  2. They should do it, but they haven't. Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The answer is easy. They are not interested in the contents of the terrorist's phone as much as they want a magic key that will unlock anyone's iPhone anywhere. The NSA already has all the metadata from this phone recorded anyway, so the whole alarmist search for the phone's contents is a front for the government's overweening desire to pry into everyone's life.

  3. this whole thing is fishy to me by argStyopa · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What I fundamentally don't understand is this:

    EITHER
    a) if this is GENUINELY a mattter of national security, the FBI could actually hand the phone to the NSA and get the information in about 30 seconds but for some reason isn't doing so, or
    b) the NSA's upteen-gajillion-dollar "black" budget has pretty much enabled them to record/analyze/store only the utterly banal unencrypted conversations that you could hear just sitting and listening to the guy next to you at the coffeeshop, ie almost entirely wasted on stupid crap.

    I don't see really any other alternative.

    I'd expect, for example, that Russian and Chinese government communications are ROUTINELY of a higher level of encryption than the bloody iPhone you can buy at the mall, and yet the NSA's *job* is to listen in on that stuff and they claim that they're pretty damned good at it?

    --
    -Styopa