FBI agrees to unlock iPhone, iPod in Arkansas homicide case – Houston Chronicle
The FBI agreed Wednesday to help an Arkansas prosecutor unlock an iPhone and iPod belonging to two teenagers accused of killing a couple, just days after the federal agency announced it had gained access to an iPhone linked to the gunman in a mass shooting in California.{…}
The FBI announced Monday that it had gained access to an iPhone belonging to Syed Farook, who died with his wife in a gun battle with police after they killed 14 people in San Bernardino in December. The FBI hasn’t revealed how it cracked Farook’s iPhone. Authorities also haven’t said whether the iPhone and iPod in the Arkansas case are the same models or whether the FBI will use the same method to try to get into the devices.
Hiland said he could not discuss details of the murder case in Arkansas, but confirmed the FBI had agreed less than a day after the initial request.
From: FBI agrees to unlock iPhone, iPod in Arkansas homicide case – Houston Chronicle
This is interesting – it rather sounds like they might have a real hack.
Now, will the defence lawyer challenge them to prove that they actually unlocked the phone, and didn’t falsify evidence under cover of “we can’t reveal the method or Apple will fix it”? Because that would mean the FBI would be in a bind – disclose the hacking method and get the evidence admitted, or refuse to disclose and potentially not only lose the admissibility, but produce a precedent that phones hacked by their secret method are inadmissible?Report
This was the motivation behind ACLU v. NSA, by the way. It’s not that warrantless wiretapping had only recently been invented, and the ACLU had just then found out about it; it was that the Bush administration wanted to use wiretap-collected evidence in court proceedings, and wanted to see whether a court would accept that it had been collected legally.Report
I don’t think there’s any question the evidence was collected legally – if it was collected accurately, or at all.
But if the FBI hands the phone over to a third party, who do things undisclosed to the phone, and then they extract evidence from it, how are they supposed to support an uninterrupted chain of custody, and that nothing done to the phone has altered its contents?Report