What's strange is that they're investigating two international terrorists who committed mass murder and all they're talking about is their fucking iPhone?<p>What if after all this drama and forcing everyone to install backdoors and disable encryption they find out that they used it only to play Clash of Clans and take pictures of food?
iCloud backups are not protected by your iCloud password. I know this because I've personally reset my password and then successfully recovered an iCloud backup to a new phone with the new password.<p>However, the auto-backup feature, which would have pushed the most recent data from the phone onto iCloud just by leaving the phone powered on... apparently that is disabled when the iCloud password is reset. Which makes sense if you think about it, the phone still has the old iCloud password, and it would need the new password in order to authenticate to iCloud. So they inadvertently disabled the backup feature by locking the phone out of iCloud!<p>The first question this raises is can the auto-backup be made to start working again by Apple changing their backend iCloud authentication code to specifically allow this device to login to iCloud with the "wrong" (old) passsword? That would not involve touching the phone and seems like a much cleaner solution. Unless there is code on the phone which disables or destroys the iCloud authentication token / stored password after encountering a login error, which really would surprise me, because API errors could be spurious, but I guess it's possible if they are looking specifically for an "invalid login" return code and then dumping the old token in order to trigger a UI prompt to enter a new password.<p>The second question is why are the existing backups a month and a half old? Doesn't this imply the device was not even turned on or connected to the network for that last month and a half?<p>The other interesting tidbit in the article is the statement the FBI was able to verify that the phone was never paired with any devices to obtain data. How in the world could they know that?<p>(Cross-posting this comment from another article, because it's more relevant here)
Footnote 7, Page 18 of the governments brief to the court
<a href="http://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000152-fae6-d7cd-af53-fafe53bb0002" rel="nofollow">http://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000152-fae6-d7cd-af53-fafe53...</a>
More confirmation, as if anyone needed it, that this case is not about the months-old data on one particular phone, but rather about breaking the security of all phones.
Most important point in the article (to me, anyway):<p><i>"The government says the access being sought could only be used on this one phone, but Apple's executives noted that there is widespread interest in an iPhone backdoor, noting that Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said Thursday that his office has 175 Apple devices he'd like cracked."</i>
If it were an iPhone 6, how long does a finger print last on a corps? In future crimes is the FBI going to cut fingers off corpses and store them for later use?
What's preventing Apple from reverting things on the backend to 'undo' the password change and allow the next authentication and backup attempt by the phone to work? Apart from unless the phone has been restarted in which case the FS is still encrypted so the backup wouldn't yet be possible until at least after the first unlock.
Why not "enhance interrogate" the shit out of the criminal until he willingly gives up the password? It works in TV, cinema, and, according to Cheney, in real life. Amirite?<p>/s
Is there a reason Apple can't take apart the phone and access the hard drive directly?<p>Maybe put the hard drive on a dev board of sorts. AFAIK, most cell-phones have dev board versions that the mfg's engineers use to test various component hardware revisions no?. There they can access it through root? I might be missing something here.<p>It would be hilarious if after all this, they find nothing on the phone. GENIUS!