F.B.I. Error Locked San Bernardino Attacker’s iPhone
F.B.I. personnel apparently believed that by resetting the iCloud password, they could get access to information stored on the iPhone. Instead, the change had the opposite effect — locking them out and eliminating other means of getting in.
.. F.B.I. officials say that encrypted data in Mr. Farook’s phone and its GPS system may hold vital clues about where he and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, traveled in the 18 minutes after the shootings, and about whom they might have contacted beforehand.
.. Mr. Sewell, the Apple lawyer, explained to the committee that before F.B.I. officials ordered the password reset, Apple first wanted them to try to connect the phone to a “known” Wi-Fi connection that Mr. Farook had used. Doing so might have recovered information saved to the phone since October, when it was last connected to iCloud.
“The very information that the F.B.I. is seeking would have been available, and we could have pulled it down from the cloud,” he said.
.. “If the F.B.I. hadn’t instructed San Bernardino County to change the password to the iCloud account, all this would have been unnecessary, and you would have had that information,” said Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York.
Mr. Gowdy leveled a similar criticism during the more than two and a half hours of testimony from Mr. Comey.
“With all due respect to the F.B.I., they didn’t do what Apple had suggested they do in order to retrieve the data, correct?” Mr. Gowdy asked the director. “I mean, when they went to change the password, that kind of screwed things up, did it not?”