On the 11th of March the news broke that a US federal magistrate had ordered Apple to help the FBI unlock the iPhone of one of the individuals involved in the San Bernardino mass shooting. Apple immediately rejected this request, citing an unprecedented threat to their customers security as the key factor. This rejection sparked a short but fierce legal battle between the US government and the silicon valley tech giant - making it one of the most high profile examples of the debate on surrounding encryption worldwide.
A federal court ordered Apple to create a software tool that would bypass security mechanisms in Apple’s software so that the government could perform what’s known as a brute force password attack to guess Farook’s password. However, this has now been rendered moot for now as the FBI managed to break into the iPhone 5C. The problem is nobody outside of government (including Apple) seems to know how.
"One way or another, Apple needs to figure out the details," said Justin Olsson, product counsel at security software specialists, AVG Technologies. "The responsible thing for the government to do is privately disclose the vulnerability to Apple so they can continue hardening security on their devices”. Unfortunately, it appears the FBI have no intention of doing so - an unhappy consequence of the increasingly adversarial position was adopted by Apple during the height of the legal challenge.
As the legal battle played out, the FBI appealed to cyber security experts all over the world for help but nothing appeared viable. However, a company that the FBI has so far declined to identify came forward about two weeks ago. After initial contact with the FBI, some company officials flew to Washington to lay out their solution and set about trying to break into the iPhone. They succeeded, and several investigators are current sifting through the data on the phone, although it’s unclear if anything of value has been recovered so far.
Although the FBI have dropped their legal action, this issue is far from over. We should expect to see Apple and its competitors significantly step up their security and privacy measures in the future. Andrew Crocker, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, believes the irony of this whole situation is that it made many smartphone users sit up and take notice of encryption. “When the FBI decided to make this a public case, it’s safe to say they were not thinking about the awareness of this issue,” says Crocker. “One side effect of that is that average people who use smartphones are thinking about encryption on their devices in a way that they weren’t a month and a half ago.”
The widespread publicity of this issue has opened up a can of worms that the FBI may have preferred to keep closed - there is now an international debate around privacy. An issue that was once confined to the fringes has expanded into the mainstream and the ramifications are potentially huge, not just for tech - but for society in general.
