Members of Congress have long been skeptical of the administration’s claims about digital privacy, and the government’s latest maneuver will likely set off those lawmakers’ bullshit detectors once more.
On Monday night, the Department of Justice informed a federal magistrate judge in California that it would no longer try to compel Apple to disable security features on an iPhone–one that belonged to deceased San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook.
At least one Member of Congress, a leading proponent of online civil liberties, reacted to the news by accusing the feds of misleading the public for months about the FBI’s ability to break into the device, without help from the judicial branch.
“The fact that the FBI ultimately found an alternative solution suggests that it did not conduct full due diligence before filing the lawsuit,” said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) in a statement on Monday.
In its motions, the Justice Department had used the phrase “Apple has the sole ability to assist us” 19 times, the Guardian’s Trevor Timm noted.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, too, argued that the Obama administration’s claims must be called into disrepute.
“Journalists: please remember that the government argued for months that this was impossible, despite expert consensus,” he tweeted on Monday.
Unnamed law enforcement officials told the New York Times that an outside company provided the means to access the iPhone, and claimed that it was unclear if the method could be applied to models other than Farook’s 5C, which was using an Apple iOS 9 operating system.
It’s also unclear exactly how they cracked the device. The FBI was demanding that Apple design software that would dismantle the phone’s password security features. The bureau had claimed that without the patch, police could not use a brute force attack to unlock an iPhone without destroying its data.
A ruling against Apple could have had sweeping consequences, requiring tech companies of all sorts to prime their devices for surveillance at the behest of the Department of Justice—a requirement that lawmakers like Rep. Lieu had been uneasy about codifying into law. Lieu’s statement argued that the FBI going to the courts was “especially inappropriate” while Congress and the White House are “actively engaged on the issue.”
The government’s motion to force the unlocking of Farook’s phone followed a year of public hearings on Capitol Hill, in which administration officials attempted to persuade lawmakers to support the insertion of security weaknesses in encrypted channels. FBI Director James Comey even went as far as to suggest legislation mandating the establishment of “backdoors” in such applications.
Comey has, thus far, utterly failed. He has been unable to sway enough lawmakers to support what he described last year as a “legislative fix” to encryption, and, in some cases, the bureau chief has been met with outright hostility. Last April, Rep. Lieu described altering encryption so only good guys can get in as “impossible” and “technologically stupid.”
Congressional hearings on encryption will likely continue even as the DOJ abandons its Apple fight in central California. The government has filed similar suits against the company in nearly a dozen other cases involving iPhones, and it has provided no indication yet that it will surrender in those battles, too.
“We will continue to help law enforcement with their investigations, as we have done all along,” Apple said in a statement on Monday. The company added that it will also “continue to increase the security of our products as the threats and attacks on our data become more frequent and more sophisticated.”
