An urgent meeting inside FBI headquarters little more than a week ago is what convinced federal law enforcement officials that they may be able to abandon a brewing legal fight with tech giant Apple, sources told ABC News today. In the days after the December 2015 massacre in San Bernardino, California, which killed 14 people ...
The Department of Justice said in a federal court filing Monday that it had bypassed encryption on the iPhone 5c used by a terrorist in a mass shooting last year in California and requested the court vacate its order compelling Apple to assist it in accessing the device. The filing effectively ends a contentious legal ...
When the FBI said it couldn't unlock the iPhone at the center of the San Bernardino shooting investigation without the help of Apple, the hackers at DriveSavers Data Recovery took it as a challenge. Almost 200 man hours and one destroyed iPhone later, the Bay Area company has yet to prove the FBI wrong. But ...
The Apple-FBI fight may just be the opening salvo in a broader war over encryption, as technology companies continue to lock up their users’ messages, photos and other data to shield them from thieves and spies — and, incidentally, criminal investigators. WhatsApp, the globally popular messaging system owned by Facebook, has already run into trouble ...
Before the San Bernardino terror attack, Syed Rizawan Farook's iPhone was just one fancy Apple device among hundreds of millions worldwide. But since the California government worker and his wife shot and killed 14 people on December 2, apparently inspired by extremist group IS, his iPhone 5c has become a key witness - and the ...
Google is disclosing how much of the traffic to its search engine and other services is being protected from hackers as part of its push to encrypt all online activity. Encryption shields 77 percent of the requests sent from around the world to Google’s data centers, up from 52 percent at the end of 2013, ...
It has been frustrating to watch as the horrific San Bernardino terrorist killing spree has been used as a cover by the FBI to achieve the anti-encryption goals they've been working towards for years. Much of that frustration stems from the fact that the American media has so poorly reported the facts in this case. ...
President Barack Obama said Friday that the encryption versus national security debate, currently being played out in Apple’s legal fight against the federal government, won’t be settled by taking an “absolutist view.” Addressing an audience of tech enthusiasts meeting in the Texas capital, Obama said both values are important. He restated his commitment to strong ...
As the Apple vs. FBI encryption debate heats up in California, the U.S. government on Thursday fired back at Apple's oppositions to a court order compelling its assistance in an FBI investigation, and in a new motion discounted a number of arguments related to supposed backdoors, "master keys," the All Writs Act and more. In ...
By July 2015, FBI Director Jim Comey knew he was losing the battle against sophisticated technologies that allowed criminals to communicate without fear of government surveillance. In back-to-back congressional hearings that month, Comey struggled to make the case that terrorists and crooks were routinely using such encryption systems to evade the authorities. He conceded that ...
