Any day now, Hillar Moore is expecting a call from the FBI.
Moore, a district attorney in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has publicly lamented that Apple’s iPhone encryption is keeping local police out of a victim’s phone in a recent murder. On Monday, Moore’s ears perked up when the FBI announced it would drop its court battle with Apple after it figured out a way to pull data from the iPhone of Syed Farook, the San Bernardino gunman.
Moore, like many others, wants in.
“Waiting on them to call me,” he wrote in an email exchange with the Guardian, “to see if they can assist in getting into my phone.”
The FBI now faces a series of tough questions after it announced to the world that it has a technique for hacking into Farook’s iPhone – something Apple says shouldn’t be possible on current models without a user’s passcode. Naturally, a lot of other people – from local police to parents – say they could benefit from the technology.
The technique is a closely guarded secret at FBI headquarters. It probably relies on a security flaw in Apple’s mobile operating system. Because of that, the bureau realizes that the more widely it’s shared, the more likely Apple could learn about the technique and patch it.
Such a calculus can be hard to fathom for people who just want access to a locked iPhone. A father in Italy is asking Apple to unlock his dead son’s phone – so he can reminisce through his son’s stored pictures – or he will try to find whatever tool the FBI used. On Wednesday, a local prosecutor in Arkansas told the Associated Press that the bureau had agreed to share its technique with him in a murder case involving an iPhone and an iPod.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/01/fbi-apple-iphone-unlock-encryption-san-bernardino
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