Apple: Terrorist's Apple ID Password Changed In Government Custody, Blocking Access

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The Apple ID password linked to the iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino terrorists was changed less than 24 hours after the government took possession of the device, senior Apple executives said Friday. If that hadn’t happened, Apple said, a backup of the information the government was seeking may have been accessible.

Now, the government, through a court order, is demanding Apple build what the company considers a special back door way into the phone — an order that Apple is challenging. The government argues Apple would not be creating a backdoor.

The executives said the company had been in regular discussions with the government since early January, and that it proposed four different ways to recover the information the government is interested in without building a backdoor. One of those methods would have involved connecting the iPhone to a known Wi-Fi network.

Apple sent engineers to try that method, the executives said, but the experts were unable to do it. It was then that they discovered that the Apple ID password associated with the phone had been changed. (The FBI claims this was done by someone at the San Bernardino Health Department.)

Had that password not been changed, the executives said, the government would not need to demand the company create a “backdoor” to access the iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, who died in a shootout with law enforcement after a terror attack in California that killed 14 people. The Department of Justice filed a motion to compel the company to do that earlier Friday.

The Apple senior executives spoke with reporters on Friday afternoon to respond to the government’s filing, noting that the government had opened the door to discussion of Apple’s prior efforts in the case by discussing those actions in their Friday filing.

Creating the backdoor access, the executives said, would put at risk the privacy of millions of users. It would not only serve to unlock one specific phone, they said, but create a sort of master key that could be used to access any number of devices. The government says the access being sought could only be used on this one phone.

Asked why the company is pushing back so hard against this particular FBI request when it has assisted the agency in the past, Apple executives noted that the San Bernadino case is fundamentally different from others in which it was involved. Apple has never before been asked to build an entirely new version of its iOS operating system designed to disable iPhone security measures.

The Apple senior executives also pushed back on the government’s arguments that Apple's actions were a marketing ploy, saying they were instead based on their love for the country and desire not to see civil liberties tossed aside.

The U.S. Department of Justice has not yet responded to a request for comment.

LINK: DOJ Calls Apple’s Refusal To Unlock iPhone A Marketing Stunt