A locked phone used by a dead terrorist initially may have seemed like the perfect test case for law enforcement to argue that it needs ways to get around advanced device security.
But authorities may have picked the wrong phone after all. It’s becoming increasingly clear that law enforcement doesn’t really think there’s any important data on San Bernardino killer Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone and that it has more precedent-setting value than investigative value.
“I’ll be honest with you, I think that there is a reasonably good chance that there is nothing of any value on the phone,” San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan told NPR reporter Steve Inskeep on Friday.
Consider that it was Farook’s work phone, actually belonging to San Bernardino County, his employer. Farook also had and used two personal phones and a laptop, which he demolished before he and his wife left their home to shoot 14 people dead at an office holiday party.
Between Apple, Verizon, and the National Security Agency, which turned over metadata, the authorities had plenty of phone data, none of which indicated any overseas terror connection.
They even had data from the iPhone in question up until six weeks before the shooting, because of its iCloud backups. And the FBI might have been able to back up the phone again if it hadn’t told the county government to reset its iCloud password.
FBI Director James Comey has acknowledged the possibility that there’s nothing useful on the phone. “Maybe the phone holds the clue to finding more terrorists. Maybe it doesn’t,” he wrote in a letter posted on the blog Lawfare on Sunday.
Apple lawyers don’t believe the FBI really cares about this particular phone at all.
In a motion filed on Thursday, they wrote that the bureau’s director would never talk at such length about an ongoing investigation if he had any suspicion that there might be a co-conspirator to convict.
“This is the only case in counsel’s memory in which an FBI director has blogged in real-time about pending litigation, suggesting that the government does not believe the data on the phone will yield critical evidence about other suspects,” read the motion.
“If the government did have any leads on additional suspects, it is inconceivable that it would have filed pleadings on the public record, blogged, and issued press releases discussing the details of the situation, thereby thwarting its own efforts to apprehend the criminals.”
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Also consider how a budding security state might be motivated to act when its evolution toward authoritarianism is being threatened.
With Bernie on the rise, the moral issues of whether we should have this type of surveillance will surely be discussed.
A rubber stamp FISA court isn’t a great record for the security establishment to try to defend when pressed. Luckily (from their perspective) relatively few people know what that is.
But people know Apple. And this story has been all over the news.
So when the security debate begins in earnest in the general election and beyond, this is what the public will remember.
“Luckily” for the security establishment, the court has ruled in favor of privacy and against the security state. This will make their argument seem infinitely more reasonable than having to defend the FISA courts.
The public discussion will revolve around this case instead.
I want to dispel the notion that the world’s most powerful intelligence apparatus doesn’t know what it’s doing. It knows exactly what it’s doing.
As I blogged in the previous article (Feb 17th Apple Leads the Charge on Security, But Who Will Follow?) …”The ‘terrorists’ are dead. There is nothing new to glean from peeping into their phones…”
Now keep in mind, this was over a week ago before all of us learned that the F.B.I. reset the password on the phone and way before San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan “honestly” admitted; “…I think that there is a reasonably good chance that there is nothing of any value on the phone.”
Everybody with at least 2 brain cells could have told the FBI/US police state that. It was a given that these 2 criminally insane individuals were ‘lone wolves’. If the FBI suddenly ‘finds’ new evidence to the contrary, this will be from the file of “MANUFACTURING EVIDENCE”.
TED 2015 Trevor Aaronson: How this ‘FBI’ strategy is actually creating US-based terrorists
There’s an organization responsible for more terrorism plots in the United States than al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab and ISIS combined: The FBI. How? Why?
http://www.ted.com/talks/trevor_aaronson_how_this_fbi_strategy_is_actually_creating_us_based_terrorists
Dec 2, 2015 San Bernardino shooting WITNESS ’41NBC’, *They were all white men*
https://youtu.be/s45OeXNRZng
February 24, 2016 They Can Already Hack the iPhone — FBI’s Public Display is Propaganda to Sell You the Police State.
The apparent battle between Apple and the FBI at least tells us that the post-Snowden privacy debate is still alive. The subject of the controversy is an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters, and the FBI did not choose this case randomly.
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/fbi-hack-iphone-already-making-fight-apple-tactic-surveillance-state/#gdSMxoogTxv0xOeD.99
James Comey is not as vicious a criminal as J. Edgar, but claiming that the murder of nine black people at the South Carolina church wasn’t terrorism is unequivocally racist . The killer SPECIFICALLY said that he left a survivor so that she could tell everyone that he wanted to start a race war.
Also, “the witnesses representing law enforcement trotted out scary hypothetical situations and terrifying anecdotes about how encryption could stifle investigations and let “bad guys” go free. But when asked by Senators if they had any actual numbers on how often strong encryption thwarted investigations, neither Director Comey nor DAG Yates had any idea.”
Not to mention that the quote above is from July of last year, more than four months before the San Bernardino shooting.
Another expensive wild goose chase. Considering that National Security still doesn’t know with any certainty who the 14 hijackers of 9/11 infamy were – and all their phone records were accessible – what makes anybody think they’d know more about Farook in more 3 months, or in 15 more years?
As I suspected this isn’t about gathering information on terrorism, this appears to be a rush by fascist/authoritarian factions within our government to limit American citizens the right to privacy. They eliminated the 1960s civil rights bill, so this is the next logical step.
And terrorists, I mean officials in Flint Michigan are walking free. But this damn phone is more relevant than the lives of those affected.
The metadata for any calls or texts from that phone will long ago been retrieved from the carrier. If there were texts within the few days preceding the massacre, the carrier will have had the actual content and it would have been instantly subpoenaed or acquired via NSL.
Any emails will have been on the carrier’s or employer’s server (and on backup servers) and the FBI will have secured those immediately.
So, unless the attackers used that phone to keep relevant private notes (since the last backup), or photos never shared with anyone, it’s unreasonable to believe there is anything of significance there that isn’t already in the Feds’ possession.
From the beginning, it’s been clear that this is just another scam to help the police state defeat encryption and further erode individual privacy.
FBI, FBI, FBI….aren’t these the bozos who wasted $$$ 1BB on some terror information system that couldn’t search on two parameters in the same query like “flight” and “school”
You go, @JennaMC_Laugh !! OX !! Good old fashioned common sense appears to be in dreadful short supply, anymore. Jeez.