The FBI’s director said that the whole debate about backdoors on the iPhone is misplaced.
At a House Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, FBI Director James Comey testified that the San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook’s iPhone 5C already had a built-in vulnerability that investigators are trying to exploit. But they’re hoping to get Apple’s help.
“There’s already a door on that phone,” Comey said. “We’re asking Apple to take the guard dog away and let us pick the lock.”
The “door” Comey referenced is Farook’s passcode. The guard dog is a setting on the iPhone that erases all the phone’s data when 10 wrong passcodes are entered.
The FBI has asked Apple to create a software program to bypass the lock-out mechanism and allow it to guess as many passcodes as it wants. Apple has cited the First Amendment in its argument that the government cannot force it to write software it doesn’t want to.
Apple believes that building such software would constitute a backdoor, potentially allowing anyone to reuse that code and break into other iPhones.
But Comey insists that there are no broad implications of the FBI’s request. It is simply trying to get into this one particular iPhone.
He acknowledged that it’s conceivable that the unlocking software could get into the wrong hands. But he said the FBI believes that hypothetical scenario to be an unreasonable argument against Apple’s cooperation.
“What if Apple engineers get kidnapped?” Comey asked rhetorically.
In prepared testimony set to be delivered later in the hearing, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance wrote that iPhone encryption “cripples even the most basic steps of a criminal investigation,” and it also prevents law enforcement from exonerating innocent people suspected of crimes.
Apple, which will be represented by its general counsel, Bruce Sewell, at the hearing, has argued that hackers and governments are becoming more proficient at breaking into phones. Encryption that even Apple can’t unlock could prevent, for example, the Chinese government from forcing Apple to unlock a phone owned by a Chinese dissident.
Also testifying is cybersecurity professor Susan Landau.
Though Apple has chosen to fight the FBI in a very high-profile case of terrorism, Vance noted that state and local officials handle 95% of all criminal prosecutions in the United States. They deal with all sorts of criminals.
For example, Vance said his office has been frustrated in prosecuting three attempted murder suspects, people accused of sexually abusing a child, child pornographers, people charged with assault, robbers, and identity thieves among others.
Since Apple began encrypting iPhones by default in September 2014, Vance said his office has been locked out of 175 iPhones, or one quarter of the 670 Apple devices that his office’s Cyber Lab obtained from suspects. In each of those cases, his office had a valid search warrant to obtain the information on the suspects’ phones.