FBI didn’t fully know its own capabilities during showdown with Apple
FBI didn’t fully know its own capabilities during showdown with Apple

          
          
Additionally, the OIG also found that when then FBI Director James Comey swore up and down in Congressional hearings that there was no alternative but to force the issue in court—it wasn’t entirely true.
"We have engaged all parts of the US government to see, does anybody have a way, short of asking Apple, to do it, with a 5C running iOS9, and we do not," Comey told Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) during a March 1, 2016 hearing.
However, the new OIG report reveals that by February 11, the head of yet another FBI group—known as the Remote Operations Unit—had been in touch with a vendor that "he worked closely with [who] was almost 90 percent of the way toward a solution that the vendor had been working on for many months, and he asked the vendor to prioritize completion of the solution." In short, weeks before Comey’s testimony before Congress, the FBI actually did know of a technique that was nearly all the way there.
Still, the report seems to tiptoe around this point.
During Comey’s February 9 and March 1 testimonies, OIG continues: "the FBI was not in the possession of any means to access the data on the Farook iPhone and believed assistance from Apple would be required to accomplish this. We further found that [Executive Assistant Director] Hess’s April testimony to the effect that rapidly changing technology was a reason that the FBI was not able to exploit the iPhone without assistance was accurate."
Matthew Green, a well-known cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University, tweeted his frustration with the FBI on Tuesday.

I don’t expect the FBI to have perfect internal communications all the time. Unless they’re making a massive, unprecedented request to Congress, the courts, and the American people. Then they don’t get to do things halfway. pic.twitter.com/aeUhmTipvY
— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) March 27, 2018
The OIG report concludes by noting that the FBI "is taking further steps" to mitigate such confusion in the future and will "add a new section" to "consolidate resources to address the ‘Going Dark’ problem."
Apple declined to comment on the report.


          
                  