The FBI Wants to Crack Another iPhone After Minnesota Stabbings

The FBI Wants to Crack Another iPhone After Minnesota Stabbings
But will they actually be able to?

The FBI and Apple might be headed for another fight over the case of a locked phone. Last night, FBI special agent Rich Thorton confirmed that the agency is trying to crack an iPhone belonging to Dahir Adan, a 20-year-old Somali immigrant who stabbed 10 people in a Minnesota mall last month. Per Wired, Thorton said the bureau was already sifting through some "780 gigabytes of data from multiple computers and other electronic devices," but unlocking Adan's phone could shed valuable light on why he did what he did and help figure out who (if anyone) helped him on his path.

But cracking the phone isn't a matter of course -- the FBI's currently weighing its "legal and technical" options to get inside the unspecified device. A lot of the FBI's work here depends on what kind of iPhone they recovered, too -- the introduction of iOS 8 two years ago meant not even Apple could decrypt the contents of a locked device running that software.

"Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data," the company wrote in 2014, referring to photos, messages, contacts and more. "So it's not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running iOS 8."

Still, that didn't stop the FBI cracking from iPhone 5c owned by Rizwan Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters who killed 14 people in late 2015. The road to that crack was a winding one -- the FBI originally pushed Apple for support to unlock the iOS 9-powered device, and got court orders compelling the company to assist. Apple resisted, but the FBI ultimately found a way to crack Farook's iPhone without Apple's assistance, a move that apparently cost the bureau a tidy sum. At the time, FBI director James Comey said he hadn't decided if the bureau would reveal that crucial backdoor to Apple out of concerns it would be closed.

While the FBI might still have that particular ace up its sleeve, the process of sifting through Adan's data might be way more difficult. Farook's iPhone 5c lacked the secure enclave that was baked into newer models with the A7 chipset and beyond. It's unclear at this point how much progress the FBI has made -- only time will tell if it'll try to force Apple to help somehow, or how Apple will response if the government comes knocking.