FBI director confident iPhone exploit can be kept under wraps
FBI Director James Comey said Wednesday night that he is confident the agency can protect the tool it has purchased for cracking an encrypted iPhone used by one of the shooters in San Bernardino, Calif., terrorist attack.
“The FBI is very good at keeping secrets,” he said during an appearance at Ohio’s Kenyon College. “And the people we bought this from, I know a fair amount about them, and I have a high degree of confidence that they are very good at protecting it and their motivations align with ours.”
{mosads}Comey suggested that the technique’s efficacy could be limited, noting that that it only works on a specific model of iPhone running a certain version of Apple’s iOS operating system.
He also said that there are conversations “within the government” about providing information about the technique to Apple, which could allow the company to patch the vulnerability that allows the agency to access the data.
“That’s an interesting conversation, because [if] we tell Apple, they’re going to fix it and then we’re back where we started from,” he said, to laughter. “But look, as silly as that may sound, we may end up there. We just haven’t decided yet.”
At a different point during the event, he said that authorities could also end up revealing details of the technique as part of the discovery process in a criminal case.
In the San Bernardino case, the FBI asked a court to compel Apple to write code that could let it access encrypted data on the phone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the two shooters. Apple fought back, and some engineers were reportedly ready to leave their jobs rather than comply with the government’s demands.
The case ignited a national debate over the role of encryption in consumer technology that has led many on Capitol Hill to call for congressional action on the issue.
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