security

FBI Director James Comey recently said that Apple's assistance in San Bernardino iPhone case would represent a simple one-off event, and that it wouldn't represent the opening of floodgates that would see Apple extracting data from any old device. Well, only 24 hours later, it seems that the Department of Justice doesn't exactly share the mindset, and is filing court orders across the United States now in the hope of forcing Apple to extract iPhone data in a dozen further criminal investigations.

It probably won't come as any surprise that Apple is still vehemently opposed to assisting the FBI in decrypting the iPhone that belonged to one of the accused in the California shooting last year. After initially being ordered by a federal judge to assist law enforcement agencies with their enquiries, the Cupertino-based company has since opted against compliance on the grounds that what it is being asked to do could have serious ongoing repercussions for all iPhone owners. Now, in an effort to shed some clarity on the situation, Tim Cook's company has published a FAQ that goes into additional detail as to why compliance is a very bad idea in this instance.

Senior Apple executives have told reporters on a scheduled call that county officials within San Bernardino reset the Apple ID/iCloud password associated with the iPhone 5c that is part of the law enforcement's case. The executives also went as far as to say that if the Apple ID password had not been reset in the crucial hours after the shooting in California, then it was highly possible that the data FBI needed from the device could have been retrieved from iCloud backups after a court order without having to build any backdoor to iPhone which FBI is now demanding Apple to create.