“On Sunday, March 20, 2016, an outside party demonstrated to the Federal Bureau of Investigation a possible method for unlocking Farooks iPhone”. Authorities say they need time to determine if the method will work without compromising data on the phone.
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Little is known at this point who this “outside party” is or what their method entails.
A court hearing scheduled for tomorrow between Apple and the Department of Justice has been cancelled.
A judge in February ruled Apple must comply with the government’s request, and the DOJ and Apple were due back before that judge on Tuesday after a month of legal briefings.
Throughout the government’s filings and in congressional testimony, the government maintained that Apple’s assistance was crucial to recovering additional date from the iPhone.
The filing said the government contacted Apple’s lawyer at 2:45pm PT today.
“That is why we asked the court to give us some time to explore this option”, she said. Apple never said that it wouldn’t turn over information involving this case; indeed, the company had already turned over information to the DOJ involving Farook.
The ACLU has filed a court brief supporting Apple’s position.
If the case does proceed, Apple said, it will seek to talk to the government source that tried to hack the phone to see what they believed the vulnerability was. Farook and Malik were killed in a shootout with police hours after the attack.
The FBI said Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, were inspired by the so-called Islamic State and that the iPhone may contain crucial evidence.
“We need to protect your data and your privacy”, Cook said. Experts have previously suggested that the iPhone’s auto-erase function could be surmounted by making a copy of the phone’s flash memory.
With cloning, multiple copies are made of the phone’s memory and pass codes are tried against each copy. By constantly restoring the original copy of that data after every nine guesses, the agency potentially could avoid triggering the feature that makes the phone’s contents inaccessible after 10 failed tries.
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The data itself would remain encrypted until the phone is unlocked, but it would remain viable while investigators continued to guess the passcode, he added.
