he U.S. government said Monday that it might have a way to unlock the phone of one of the assailants in December's terror attack in San Bernardino without the help of Apple.
In
making the announcement, the government asked for and received a delay
in a Tuesday court hearing that was billed as a showdown in the FBI's effort to force Apple to help unlock the phone.
In a filing Monday afternoon, the FBI said it now needs time to investigate another possible way to unlock Syed Rizwan Farook's phone.
"On Sunday, March 20, 2016, an outside party demonstrated to the FBI a possible method for unlocking Farook’s iPhone,"
the U.S. attorney wrote in court papers. "Testing is required to
determine whether it is a viable method that will not compromise data on
Farook’s iPhone. If the method is viable, it should eliminate the need
for the assistance from Apple Inc. set forth in the All Writs Act Order
in this case."
Prosecutors asked that the hearing in Riverside federal court be put on hold "to provide time for testing the method."
The
case has become a battleground in a broader dispute between elected
officials, law enforcement and technology executives over how far
companies must go in aiding criminal investigations.
A Justice Department
spokeswoman said in a statement that federal authorities had continued
to seek an alternative way to access the phone's contents even during
the heated litigation and public back-and-forth with Apple. If the new
method works, it would help investigators to continue looking into the
Dec. 2 terrorist attack that killed 14 people and wounded 22,
said Melanie R. Newman, director of the Justice Department's office of
public affairs.
"We must first test this method to ensure it
doesn't destroy the data on the phone, but we remain cautiously
optimistic," she said.
Although FBI agents have stitched together much about Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik,
who joined him in the attack, they say the confiscated phone might
contain information that would help answer other questions, such as
whether the killers had accomplices. Farook and Malik were killed in a
shootout with police hours after the attack.
Prosecutors turned to
the courts for help after Apple refused FBI requests that its engineers
find a way to work around security measures built into the iPhone.
Specifically, they wanted the company to write new software that, when
uploaded to Farook’s phone, would bypass a security feature that renders
the phone useless when more than 10 attempts are made to enter the
phone’s four-digit pass code.
With
this done, agents planned to use a computer program to churn through
the 10,000 possible pass codes until hitting upon the right one.
Jonathan
Zdziarski, a leading expert on iPhone security, put the highest odds on
federal authorities now giving a shot to copying a portion of the
phone's memory that controls the password-guess counter. 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.
At the crux
of the legal fight has been the All Writs Act, a sweeping, centuries-old
law intended to provide judges the authority to issue orders when other
avenues are unavailable.
Prosecutors have insisted the act provides a solid legal foundation for the judge to compel Apple to write new software to allow FBI agents to circumvent security features built into the iPhone Farook had used.
In its latest filing, Apple
repeated its assertion that applying the act in this case would be
wrong because it does not permit judges to make rulings that go beyond
the limits of existing law.
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