article: But it leaves the issue at the heart of the dispute unresolved: could the FBI have forced Apple to help it unlock the device? It is unlikely that this will be the last time a law enforcement agency tries to compel a tech company to help bypass security measures. It had been reported that there were about a dozen other cases in which the US Justice Department was pursuing court orders to force Apple to help its investigators. The highest profile of these was in Brooklyn, New York, where the FBI wanted access to an iPhone belonging to a defendant who had already pleaded guilty to drug dealing. In that case, a federal judge had rejected the DoJ's effort to invoke the All Writs Act - a three-centuries-old statute that allows court orders to be issued in circumstances where other laws don't apply. The DoJ had launched an appeal, but it is not yet clear if it will continue or drop it. Its decision may be based on whether the technique used to extract data from Farook's handset can be used in other cases. The New York case involved an iPhone 5S running the iOS 7 operating system, while the San Bernardino, California case was about an iPhone 5C running the more modern iOS 9. What works against one device might not work against the other. But assuming the US government will at some point try again to use the All Writs Act to force Apple or some other tech company to circumvent its data protection measures, it may take a Supreme Court ruling to determine whether this is truly within the authorities' power. At this point, there is nothing to compel the FBI to reveal how it was done, although Apple is likely to be pressing hard to find out. The tech firm's lawyers have already said they would want details of the technique to be made public if evidence from the cracked iPhone is later used at trial. But it could remain secret. There is scope within US law for the authorities to withhold the source of information if it was supplied to them on a confidential basis, and to protect sensitive intelligence-gathering methodologies. Not necessarily. The court order originally obtained by the FBI had instructed Apple to come up with a special version of its operating system that would have prevented Farook's iPhone from deleting its data or imposing long lockout periods if too many incorrect passcode guesses were made. However, the latest court filings do not say that someone else has now done this, but merely that some data stored on the device has been obtained. Researchers at the cybersecurity firm IOActive had proposed that one way of getting data off an iPhone would be to "de-cap" its memory chips. The process they described involved using acid and lasers to expose and copy ID information about the device so that efforts to crack its passcode could be simulated on another computer without risk of triggering the original iPhone's self-destruct tool. If indeed this is what happened, it is
summary: The US government's declaration that it has "successfully accessed the data stored on [San Bernardino gunman] Farook's iPhone and therefore no longer requires" assistance from Apple, ends a six week-long legal clash between the tech firm and the FBI.