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?”
The Dangerous All Writs Act Precedent in the Apple Encryption Case
Judge Sheri Pym, a California district-court magistrate, has ordered Apple to come up with a new software bundle that can be loaded onto the phone and, in effect, take over the operating system and tell it to let the F.B.I. in. (Apple will have a chance to object to the order in court.) As an added point of convenience, this bundle is also supposed to let the agents enter passcodes electronically, rather than tapping them in, which is one of the many points on which the government seems to have moved from asking for compliance with a subpoena to demanding full-scale customer service.
.. If it can tell Apple, which has been accused of no wrongdoing, to sit down and write a custom operating system for it, what else could it do?
.. (The N.S.A. used, or rather promiscuously misused, another pen-register case from the same era to justify its bulk data collection.) It no longer becomes fanciful to wonder about what the F.B.I. might, for example, ask coders adept in whatever genetic-editing language emerges from the recent developments in CRISPR technology to do.
.. Could it require someone with distinct cultural or linguistic knowledge not only to give it information but to use that expertise to devise ways for it to infiltrate that community? Could an imam, for example, be asked not only to tell what he knows but to manufacture an informant?
In ‘Steve Jobs,’ Tolerating Tech’s Unpleasant Visionaries
“Steve Jobs” is not very kind to Steve Jobs. He is presented as a man who spent years denying paternity of his daughter and who later only grudgingly paid for her support. At every turn, he treats employees and colleagues as expendable cogs in his corporate game, often without understanding the damage he inflicts on those around him.
Ad Blocking and the Future of the Web
See, Amazon doesn’t want to give Apple a cut of its media sales, so Apple won’t let Amazon sell products in its apps. In Apple’s reasoning, all other vendors pay Apple a cut; Amazon shouldn’t get a pass. And Amazon is serious about not sharing revenue, because Amazon is a ruthless competitor that has taken over nearly all online retail sales in the U.S. by innovating service and delivery, and giving consumers the lowest possible price — a price that leaves them no margin to share with Apple