The FBI and the Department of Justice have slammed Apple Inc. for wasting them time in not assisting in the opening of iPhones found after the deadly shootings at a Pensacola Naval Air Station in December 2019.

Attorney General William P. Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray said Monday in a press release that there have now been significant developments in the case in which three U.S. sailors were killed and eight other Americans were wounded.

Two phones belonging to deceased gunman and military trainee Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, were found and in January this year his actions were deemed an act of terrorism. It was reported that he had tried to destroy his two iPhones after the attack and that they could contain valuable information. Nonetheless, Apple refused to unlock the phones.

At the time, it looked as though Apple was going to get into a legal wrangle with the Department of Justice. The company was criticized by President Trump for protecting criminals, although Apple responded by saying it had assisted the FBI.

Apple also had the support of the American Civil Liberties Union, which stated that giving the FBI unprecedented access to encrypted communications could lead to global privacy abuses. It now seems that the FBI didn’t need Apple’s key to encryption and has managed to open the phones by itself.

“Thanks to the great work of the FBI – and no thanks to Apple – we were able to unlock Alshamrani’s phones,” said Attorney General Barr.  “The trove of information found on these phones has proven to be invaluable to this ongoing investigation and critical to the security of the American people.  However, if not for our FBI’s ingenuity, some luck, and hours upon hours of time and resources, this information would have remained undiscovered.”

Barr said that the information found on the phones has established a definitive link between the gunman and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He added that new legislation needs to be put in place so that tech giants such as Apple cannot withhold valuable information that could affect the national security of the U.S.

Apple responded to the criticism, saying on Monday that it had assisted the investigation and had given the FBI access to Alshamrani’s various storage accounts. “The false claims made about our company are an excuse to weaken encryption and other security measures that protect millions of users and our national security,” said the company in a statement.

The FBI disagreed, issuing its own statement of Monday detailing what was found on the phones and describing how Apple hadn’t been very helpful in extracting that information.

“We received effectively no help from Apple,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray in a virtual press conference. “We canvassed every partner, and every company, that might have had a solution to access these phones. None did, despite what some claimed in the media. So we did it ourselves. Unfortunately, the technique that we developed is not a fix for our broader Apple problem — it’s of pretty limited application. But it has made a huge difference in this investigation.”

Wray added that Apple had wasted the time of investigators who had got court warrants months ago to search the phones. He added that during the time of a pandemic, public servants in the U.S. were already under enough pressure.

What the new information gleaned from the phones revealed is that Alshamrani had been planning the attack since 2015. It was proved that he’d been in direct contact with Al Qaeda, rather than foment his ire against the U.S. through indirect channels such as videos on social media.

The FBI said that Alshamrani was “meticulous” in his planning and had gone to the effort of taking videos of his classroom building. His final will and the explanation for his actions were also found on the phones. The will was the exact same will that was released by the Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula two months after the attack.

“We now have a picture of him we didn’t have before we obtained this evidence — before we could confirm that his connection to AQAP was real, before we could track his long and methodical path to violence — a picture we would never had obtained without accessing his devices,” said the FBI.

On the other hand, commentators have said that Apple now has a case in its own defense, since it has now been proved that it doesn’t need to give the authorities a backdoor into its devices. The FBI can evidently access phones by itself.

“We have always maintained there is no such thing as a backdoor just for the good guys,” Apple said Monday. “Backdoors can also be exploited by those who threaten our national security and the data security of our customers.” That also mirrored the sentiments of the ACLU.

“Every time there’s a traumatic event requiring investigation into digital devices, the Justice Department loudly claims that it needs backdoors to encryption, and then quietly announces it actually found a way to access information without threatening the security and privacy of the entire world,” ACLU senior staff attorney Brett Max Kaufman said in a statement on Monday. “The boy who cried wolf has nothing on the agency that cried encryption.”

Photo: Chad Cooper/Flickr