Investigators in Texas Attack Took Over 48 Hours to Contact Apple About Shooter's iPhone
November 08 2017 - 8:13PM
Dow Jones News
By Del Quentin Wilber and Robert McMillan
The 26-year-old gunman who massacred a Baptist congregation in
rural Texas on Sunday was carrying an iPhone, according to a
law-enforcement official. But more than 48 hours after the
incident, investigators hadn't alerted Apple Inc., or sought the
company's technical assistance.
The 48-hour lapse could prove important if the shooter,
identified as Devin Patrick Kelley, had enabled TouchID on his
phone, which allows the user to access the phone's contents using a
thumb print.
In theory, law-enforcement investigators could have tried to use
Kelley's fingers to unlock Apple's TouchID mechanism and gain
access to the phone. But iPhones require a passcode, rather than
TouchID, if they are left for 48 hours without being unlocked.
"You have a 48-hour chance to get that person's finger on that
phone to unlock it," said Dan Guido, chief executive of security
consulting firm Trail of Bits Inc. "If you let that time expire,
you're stuck with the passcode."
Apple has added security features that make guessing a passcode
difficult, including one option that restricts the number of
passcode guesses to 10 attempts.
Texas law-enforcement officials expressed frustration about not
being able to access the phone -- reviving a long-running tension
between the federal government, which says security systems hamper
investigations, and tech companies, which say they are doing their
best to protect the privacy of customers.
"Law enforcement is increasingly not able to get into these
phones," Christopher Combs, the head of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation's San Antonio field office, said at a press
conference Tuesday. "I can assure you that we are working very hard
to get into the phone."
Mr. Combs declined to identify the type of phone the gunman was
carrying, but a separate law-enforcement official briefed on the
investigation confirmed it was an iPhone.
Apple said Wednesday it "immediately reached out to the FBI
after learning from their press conference on Tuesday that
investigators were trying to access a mobile phone. We offered
assistance and said we would expedite our response to any legal
process they send us.
"We work with law enforcement every day. We offer training to
thousands of agents so they understand our devices and how they can
quickly request information from Apple," the company said in a
statement.
FBI spokeswoman Carol Cratty declined to comment.
Federal authorities sent Kelly's phone to the bureau's
laboratory in Quantico, Va., to be examined, the law-enforcement
official said.
Though Apple has refused to break into its own security systems
for the government, law enforcement often calls Apple experts to
run down a checklist of ways they can get into a phone, or preserve
evidence. The company routinely provides law enforcement with data
that is backed up to its iCloud servers.
Federal officials haven't asked Apple for any technical
assistance but are discussing matters with the company, according
to a law-enforcement officer who declined to elaborate.
While it's unclear whether Kelley used TouchID on his phone,
there's nothing that Apple could have done within the first 48
hours after the shooting that the company cannot do now, said Mr.
Guido, of Trail of Bits.
Information stored on the iPhone is protected by state-of-the
art encryption techniques that are extremely difficult -- if not
impossible -- to crack.
Last year, the FBI paid more than $1 million to gain access to
the iPhone used by one of the shooters in the 2015 San Bernardino
terrorist attack. That phone was an older iPhone 5C, introduced in
2013. Breaking into a more recent model would be even more
difficult, security professionals say.
In the San Bernardino case, the FBI was criticized resetting the
shooter's iCloud password, a maneuver that could have prevented the
phone from backing up automatically to Apple's servers, where its
data could have been recovered.
"There's an immense challenge in front of our nation to ensure
that law enforcement professionals have access to the training to
know what to do with a phone recovered at the scene of a crime,"
Mr. Guido said.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 08, 2017 19:58 ET (00:58 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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