This news story has been all over the place this past week. I found a great summary of what it entails here on Buzz Feed News.
Essentially Syed Farook was one of the San Bernardino terrorists and his phone was confiscated by the government immediately after the attack. His Apple ID password for the iPhone was changed soon after it was confiscated. This meant that the FBI then had no way to access the contents of the phone. Therefore the FBI requested that Apple create a special “backdoor” way to break into the phone and retrieve Farook’s information, which presumably contains details of the planning and execution of the December 2nd attacks that left 14 people dead.
Apple is refusing to create this backdoor technique. The catch is that if the Apple ID password had not been reset by someone after it was taken by the government then Apple would have been able to easily retrieve the information on the phone with an iCloud backup. However, someone in the San Bernardino Health Department did change the Apple ID password and they are claiming that they worked with the FBI to do so, and this thus made it eternally more difficult for Apple to unlock the information on the phone, which in turn caused the FBI to call for them to create a backdoor method for retrieving the information.
Clearly politics and the oligopoly of the FBI and Apple are playing a large role in this case. The political economy of Apple is insurmountable and therefore they understand the implications of creating a backdoor technique to unlock the private information of iPhones. It does make me wonder though if the FBI had the Apple ID password reset on purpose, because they knew that it would mean that they could call for Apple to create a backdoor hacking system that they then could use on many more phones to retrieve private information. Thoughts??
