Behind the scenes of the San Bernardino iPhone case


Jonathan Zdziarski has written some great posts about iPhone security, particularly earlier this year with the FBI's San Bernardino iPhone case. Today's post is in the context of politics and the election, but there are some interesting new tidbits about the earlier controversy.

Zdziarski had a conference call with the FBI scheduled to discuss possible solutions to getting into the the shooter's Farook iPhone, but it was abruptly canceled.

The day before the conference call was scheduled, it had gotten killed from powers on high. I was never given a detailed reason for it, and I don't think my contacts knew either except that they were told they weren't allowed to talk to anyone about the device - apparently including me, a forensics expert that had helped them to get into phones before. I don't know if the call came down from lawyers, or if it went higher than that - it's irrelevant, really. It was understood that nobody at FBI could talk to me about the case or even have a one-way conversation to give them a brain dump. Responsibility for that decision ultimately falls to Comey.

The reason I bring this up is that Comey's public facing story was that "anyone with an idea" can come to the FBI and help them out, and it made the FBI sound reasonable to the general public. This clearly wasn't true, and what was going on behind the scenes was quite the opposite.

Zdziarski speculates what many suspected; the FBI had ulterior motives for manufacturing a crisis in this case in order to establish a legal precedent.