Apple will not sue FBI to discover hacking methodmethode
Apple will not sue the FBI to demand that it disclose how it cracked the iPhone 5c of San Bernadino gunman Syed Farook last month. That’s a case Apple probably won’t win, and the vulnerability probably won’t last long anyway.
The statements are made by an anonymous Apple lawyer to Ars Technica, among others. He stated that the company does not know whether it is a software or hardware hack, nor does it understand why the hack would only work on an iPhone 5c with iOS 9. The FBI bought the hack, possibly from the Israeli company Cellebrite.
While the US state will in some cases reveal vulnerabilities in the software and hardware of technology companies to developers, it does not do so in all cases. After all, every vulnerability that the state reveals cannot be used to fight things like crime and terrorism behind the scenes. In this way a decision is made on a case-by-case basis. The US government has documented this in the Vulnerabilities Equities Process.
The FBI was engaged in a legal battle with Apple until the end of March. The service was unable to crack the security of Syed Farook’s iPhone 5c. Farook shot and killed 14 people in an office building in San Bernadino in December. The FBI wanted the judge to order Apple to write new firmware that would allow the FBI to access the smartphone. Apple refused because implementing such a backdoor leads to the same vulnerabilities in countless other devices. The FBI suddenly dropped the case at the end of March because it managed to crack the security on the phone without Apple’s help.
The FBI is still competing with Apple for the company’s cooperation on other fronts. The FBI will appeal in a New York case, it turned out Friday. In that case, it is not a terrorist’s iPhone, but that of a drug dealer. A lower court had previously ruled in Apple’s favour. Judges in the US cities of Boston and Baltimore have recently ruled in favor of the FBI in other criminal cases. That write The Register and the Boston Herald. However, the judge does not oblige Apple to defeat its own encryption.
Apple is trying to prevent a so-called precedent from being set with the legal battles. Because when a judge rules in favor of the FBI and orders Apple to crack its own security, the FBI can refer to that previous courtroom victory in subsequent, similar cases, fueling new successes in that area. However, Congress may introduce new, more modern laws before it gets to that point. That’s no guarantee, however, that the issue will work out well for Apple; On Friday, an early draft of a bill that essentially makes strong encryption illegal and requires tech companies to cooperate with agencies like the FBI, regardless of what the larger-scale ramifications might be. It is not known who the authors of that proposal are and the proposal has not been officially submitted at this time.
Update, 23/04: added a sentence about Apple losing the Boston case, but the judge doesn’t oblige the company to beat its own encryption.