LOS ANGELES Federal officials said Monday that they have unlocked the iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters and no longer need a judge to force Apple to help break into the device.
The move comes a week after justice officials brought the high-stakes legal fight against Apple to a sudden halt with an announcement that an unnamed outside group had come forward with a technique to hack into the iPhone.
While prosecutors said at the time that the method offered promise, they asked the judge in the case for time to confirm that it could grant access to the phone without jeopardizing any information stored on it.
The breakthrough came over the weekend, when FBI agents successfully extracted the phone’s contents, a law enforcement official said during a call with reporters. The official spoke on the condition his name not be used.
The official declined to say anything about the contents of the phone other than to say FBI agents are examining it.
The official declined to offer any details about the hacking method or the outside party that provided it.
Any speculation about using this method on other phones or devices is premature, the official said, adding that investigators were “committed to helping our state and local partners gain lawful access (to devices) in appropriate cases.”
Prosecutors, in a statement released Monday, said they decided to drop the case against Apple as a result of the breakthrough.
“We are now able to unlock that iPhone without compromising any information on the phone,” prosecutors said in a statement after they filed a formal request with U.S. Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym that she vacate an order compelling Apple to cooperate.
“We sought an order compelling Apple to help unlock the phone to fulfill a solemn commitment to the victims of the San Bernardino shooting — that we will not rest until we have fully pursued every investigative lead related to the vicious attack,” the statement said.
The decision appears to halt — at least for now — a historic legal showdown over the issues of national security and privacy. Apple had strongly opposed helping the FBI unlock the phone, arguing it would threaten the privacy of all its customers.
The FBI hoped the phone would provide insight into the planning of the attacks, and the movements of Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, in the hours after they shot and killed 14 people inside the Inland Regional Center on Dec. 2.
According to the court papers filed by the FBI last month, Farook disabled the phone’s iCloud backup function six weeks before the shootings, leaving federal investigators in the dark about his actions in the days and weeks before the attack.
Apple’s security measures became all but impregnable to law enforcement in September 2014, when the tech giant modified its encryption system. Farook’s phone was protected by an auto-erase feature that would permanently destroy all data on the phone after 10 consecutive incorrect password entry attempts. By disabling the iCloud backup, Farook was able to keep all his data hidden behind the phone’s passcode lock.
Previously, forensic investigators could tap into a device’s hardware port and gain access to a phone’s data “independent of needing to try passcodes,” according to Clifford Neuman, director of the University of Southern California’s Center for Computer System Security.
Monday’s announcement could also have far-reaching consequences for local law enforcement. Police nationwide have long contended that data encryption allowed criminals to store information on smartphones to avoid detection.
Thousands of the devices that have been seized during investigations in recent years currently sit idle in police evidence lockers. The Los Angeles Police Department has nearly 300 such devices, the department has said.
Though it’s unclear how the FBI gained access to Farook’s phone, the possibility that the agency found a way around Apple’s security measures could allow police access to similarly encrypted data in a much wider range of investigations.
An attorney representing relatives of several of those killed in the attack called the FBI’s announcement “a very positive development.”
“Our concern from Day One has been obtaining information of potentially great importance to both law enforcement and the victims of terrorism,” attorney Stephen Larson said in an email. “For this to have dragged out in court battles would not have served the interests of either.”