IPhone battle fizzles

By Mike Hashimoto

The Dallas Morning News

It must please the FBI to no end to have to endure Twitter trolling from Edward Snowden over its U-turn on demanding Apple hand over the keys to its iPhone encryption.

Of all people, right? Snowden, as you may have heard, is the former National Security Agency contractor and whistleblower whose knowledge, background and stolen documents have pulled back much of the curtain on government secrecy.

That has not come without a price, unless you’d rather live in Russia. It also does not mean Snowden has no point, because he does.

The FBI, remember, insisted it had exhausted all known techniques and still could not bypass Apple encryption to crack into the iPhone 5c used by Syed Farook of the husband-wife terrorist team that shot up an employee celebration in San Bernardino, Calif. The December atrocity left 14 people dead and two dozen or more injured.

The passcode for iPhone he used, owned by his county employer, died with him. It’s plausible that information the FBI could use to track cohorts, if any existed, was on the phone. Or not. In this case, it’s fishing, not phishing.

Still, the FBI was able to get U.S. Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym to rule against Apple. The FBI insisted it wanted access to only one phone, but Apple argued it has no electronic key to surrender and so must build one, which it says compromises security for every encrypted iPhone.

Information security

One phone, in the interest of national security, sounds OK, right? A key that unlocks all phones, regardless of anyone’s assurances, sounds less OK. Far less, especially if you’re an Apple customer who relies on the security of your stored information.

And what are FBI assurances worth? Last week, after insisting to a federal court that this investigative task was impossible without Apple’s acquiescence, the FBI called a timeout. Shazam, it may have found a way to unlock that Farook phone, after all.

“An outside party” had come forward to show the FBI what its own people, apparently, had not discovered. This was revealed only hours before a widely anticipated hearing on Pym’s original order.

Snowden has been saying for some time that the FBI was, um, mistaken in its contention that Apple had the “exclusive technical means” of breaking into this phone.

Now, he has taken to Twitter to say that he told us so.

This all presumes we can take the FBI and Justice Department at their word now, as opposed to before. It’s also a reasonable theory that they backed away from last week’s hearing out of concern that a reversal – and judicial declaration that their demands of Apple were unconstitutional – would create a tough precedent to overcome down the road.

It had to have been something significant to warrant a tactical reversal of such apparent embarrassment.

Apple certainly had no plans to back down; CEO Tim Cook had pledged to appeal up to the Supreme Court, if necessary. Perhaps the FBI will get into that Farook phone now. Or it won’t. The courts, in interpreting the law, should consider individual privacy and security ahead of investigative expediency.

I’d rather go on believing that my iPhone is hack-proof, even if that’s not completely logical. It would be a dozen times worse to believe the government could force a private company to weaken that security, just because.

Mike Hashimoto is a member of the Dallas Morning News editorial board. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.