Doesn't matter. The article makes it sound as if it does.
But it doesn't.
The killer worked for the county and was issued this phone. He did not return it. The idea they could have retrieved it from te cloud is horseshit. Farook stopped backing it up to his cloud account 6 weeks earlier. It’s in all the papers. That is why this solution, like all the manure about not being able to comply, is bogus. And they ere in a hurry because the phone was found on the backseat of the car the killers were driving until they got aerated. The faster you recover info on a terrorist cell, the better the intel. If you appreciate the value of the 4th amendment to prevent people who have done wrong from hiding information, then you should be in favor of getting intel on the people who KILLED 14 PEOPLE.
The full text of both the court order (itâs short, and fairly plain (tech) English), and Appleâs response, are below, but to us one interesting aspect of the court order is this paragraph:
Appleâs reasonable technical assistance shall accomplish the following three important functions: (1) it will bypass or disable the auto-erase function whether or not it has been enabled; (2) it will enable the FBI to submit passcodes to the SUBJECT DEVICE for testing electronically via the physical device port, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or other protocol available on the SUBJECT DEVICE and (3) it will ensure that when the FBI submits passcodes to the SUBJECT DEVICE, software running on the device will not purposefully introduce any additional delay between passcode attempts beyond what is incurred by Apple hardware.
Now, itâs important to understand that in legal documents such as court orders, the word âshallâ has a very specific meaning. It means âyou will do it, no ifs, ands or butsâ.
What Apple is being ordered to do in the above paragraph is to basically disable the time-out function that happens when you put the wrong passcode into an iPhone, and the ultimate destruction of the data on the phone after too many attempts, so that the FBI can attempt to discover the passcode and unlock the iPhone.