Nobody Won the Apple-FBI Standoff [View all]

[Agschmid]

The feds finally cracked the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone. Now Apple looks vulnerable—and the legal fight the FBI wants will have to wait.

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The FBI dropped its case against Apple on Monday, saying that it had “successfully accessed the data” stored on the San Bernardino, California, killer’s iPhone and, therefore, no longer needed the company’s assistance—which the bureau had been demanding in court and which Apple had been resisting.

This may seem like a happy ending all around, but in fact it’s a bad outcome for both parties—a bit more so for the bureau, at least in the short term.

Contrary to appearances, the fight was never about the specific phone used by Syed Farook. If it were—if FBI Director James Comey believed the phone contained data that was urgently needed for an investigation into terrorism—he could have sent a “Request for Technical Assistance” to the National Security Agency, as the FBI has done in such cases many times. The NSA could easily have hacked into the phone and turned over whatever it extracted to the bureau, officials say.

No, the FBI vs. Apple fight was always about—both parties rhetorically raised the stakes to make it about—the principles of privacy vs. security (or corporate security vs. national security) and whether decades of cooperation between telecoms and the intelligence agencies can survive new advances in encryption.

Source.