FBI Had No Way To Access Locked iPhone After Terror Attack, Watchdog Finds (zdnet.com)

The FBI did not have the technical capability to access an iPhone used by one of the terrorists behind the San Bernardino shooting, a Justice Department watchdog has found. ZDNet: A report by the department's Office of Inspector General sheds new light on the FBI's efforts to gain access to the terrorist's phone. It lands almost exactly a year after the FBI dropped a legal case against Apple, which had refused a demand by the government to build a backdoor that would've bypassed the encryption on the shooter's iPhone. Apple said at the time that if it was forced to backdoor one of its products, it would "set a dangerous precedent." Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, killed 14 people in the southern Californian town in December 2015. The 11-page report said that the FBI "had no such capability" to access the contents of Farook's encrypted iPhone, amid concerns that there were conflicting claims about whether the FBI may have had techniques to access the device by the time it had filed a suit against Apple. Those claims were mentioned in affidavits in the court case, as well as in testimony by former FBI director James Comey.

Comments

Rights

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's how the argument goes:

We must violate the Rights of peaceful, law abiding citizens and take away their guns because a small minority of the population misuses them to commit crimes, including murder.

We can't have a judicially overseen process to break the encryption on the personal devices of small minority terrorist or other criminals because it would infringe on the Rights of peaceful, law abiding citizens.

Did I get it right?