Apple vs. the FBI continues. Now the FBI admits what i suspected all the time..the FBI screwed up and were asking for Apple to bail them out. Unfortunatly most of the data is toasty now. We will see what actually comes of this now.
The head of the FBI admitted today his agents made a “mistake” after finding an iPhone left behind by one of the San Bernardino, California, shooters — a misstep he acknowledged “made it hard” for investigators to access the information that federal authorities are now seeking in a growing dispute with Apple.
However, speaking to a House panel, FBI Director James Comey said the Justice Department and Apple would still be caught in a tense legal battle because — even if the FBI hadn’t erred — there is “no way we would have gotten everything” from the iPhone.
Comey insisted the FBI has an obligation to conduct a complete and “competent” investigation into the attack on Dec. 2, 2015, when Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, killed 14 of Farook’s coworkers and injured 22 others at a work holiday party.
“If I didn’t do that, I ought to be fired, honestly,” Comey added.
The device at issue was provided to Farook by his employer, the San Bernardino County government. And in the wake of the assault, the FBI asked county officials to remotely reset the password for the Apple iCloud account associated with the device.
“Since the iPhone 5C was locked when investigators seized it during the lawful search on December 3rd, a logical next step was to obtain access to iCloud backups for the phone in order to obtain evidence related to the investigation in the days following the attack,” the FBI said in a previous statement.
But resetting the password “had the effect of eliminating the possibility of an auto-backup,” according to the FBI.
“Even if the password had not been changed and Apple could have turned on the auto-backup and loaded it to the cloud, there might be information on the phone that would not be accessible without Apple’s assistance as required by the All Writs Act order, since the iCloud backup does not contain everything on an iPhone,” the FBI said in its statement. “As the government’s pleadings [in current litigation] state, the government’s objective was, and still is, to extract as much evidence as possible from the phone.”