At the beginning of this year, Apple and the FBI again had a reason for conflict: law enforcement officers again needed to hack the criminal's iPhone, and Cupertino refused to help.
The fact is that in December 2019, a shooting took place at the US Navy base (in Florida, in the city of Pensacola). The fire was opened by 21-year-old Mohammed Said al-Shamrani, a Saudi air force officer who trained in the United States. He shot three people and was killed himself.
The FBI was keenly interested in unlocking two iPhones belonging to al-Shamrani. And although law enforcement officers had court permission to hack the iPhone and access data, both devices turned out to be protected by passwords and encrypted.
Then Apple representatives said that they were cooperating with the investigation and, in general, always strive to help law enforcement agencies, but the company did not help the FBI with the hacking of the aforementioned devices and only reminded the authorities of its point of view on software backdoors left specifically for law enforcement agencies:
Now the US Department of Justice has announced that FBI technicians have still managed to break into al-Shamrani's devices. During a conference call this week, FBI Director Chris Wray and US Attorney General William Barr criticized Apple for failing to help investigators.
Ray said that it took four months of painstaking work to hack al-Shamrani's two smartphones, and a considerable amount of taxpayer money was spent on it. At the same time, he stressed that the technology used for hacking is not a solution to the "wider problem with Apple devices", since it has very limited application.
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The Justice Department says that they have now managed to connect Mohammed Said al-Shamrani, with an al-Qaeda branch operating in the Arabian Peninsula, and, as it turned out, he began to cooperate with terrorists long before his arrival in the United States.
After this "breakthrough" the FBI launched a counter-terrorist operation against one of al-Shamrani's accomplices, and Ray stressed that this could have happened faster if Apple helped the FBI specialists. Despite public accusations from President Trump and Attorney General Barr, he said, Apple has not been so involved in the investigation.
Ray also criticized tech companies in general, calling their actions hypocrisy. According to him, they loudly advocate encryption, which even protects against a court order, but "happily adapt to authoritarian regimes when it suits their business interests."
Not the first time
In a similar way, circumstances developed in 2016, when law enforcement officers needed to obtain information from the iPhone 5c, which belonged to the terrorist who organized the massacre in San Bernardino. Desperate to hack the device on its own, the FBI enlisted the support of a federal judge and turned directly to Apple for this.
The company reacted to this request sharply, saying that the FBI, in fact, requires the creation of a special version of iOS with a built-in backdoor - "a master key from hundreds of millions of doors." And although the scandal managed to gain considerable momentum, in the end the confrontation came to naught, as the phone was successfully hacked without the help of Apple (and it cost the FBI more than a million dollars).
Maria Nefedova
