I would treat this claim with a great deal of skepticism. However, this is by far the smartest play for the government. Had they gone to court and lost (probably after an appeal), they would have set a precedent that would be very problematic for them going forward. By claiming this, falsely or otherwise, they hurt Apple's security reputation (most consumers will not understand or care that this happens to be an old iPhone with an old version of iOS - they will just hear or read that an iPhone was cracked), and they avoided a potentially problematic legal outcome.
The DOJ came out on top here, whether they are lying or not.
The hearing was before a federal magistrate judge and was largely administrative. Binding precedent wouldn't have been set until the case hit a higher court on appeal (which would have been inevitable regardless of who won as both sides had significant incentives for appeal). The DOJ could have dropped the case at any point before then to avoid an undesirable precedent. Until that point, a negative ruling wouldn't have been an insurmountable problem even if other, similar cases were brought. At worst, it could be pointed to as a point of persuasive authority ("here's what another judge did, your honor - doesn't that sound grand?"), but that's not binding. A lot of coverage and discussion confused an eventual precedent with the magistrate hearing.
The most likely reason for dropping the case would have had nothing to do about precedent and everything to do with the fact that they couldn't proceed without lying to the court. The entire basis for the case was that the government had no other choice but to compel Apple to build "GovOS." The moment they became aware of the existence of an alternative method, they had a duty to update their brief and inform the court. And at that point, with the entire basis for their case effectively gone, they were pretty much out of options.
From the FBI's perspective, that was rather unfortunate. They probably figured this was the perfect case to pursue to try and gain the sort of precedent they wanted (an instance of Islamic terrorism on American soil? It checks all of the boxes for manipulating the public into supporting the FBI). Most likely, they never expected Apple to fight back for fear of the PR consequences of impeding a terror investigation. Minor miscalculation, that.
>a negative ruling wouldn't have been an insurmountable problem
It was setting them up for a precedent-setting legal decision in a higher court that may very well have not gone the government's way.
>they couldn't proceed without lying to the court
You're assuming that this mysterious third party that showed up the day before the initial hearing with a method to crack the phone actually exists, and that this method was successful. That is certainly a possibility, but it is also possible that they never intended to see this through and hoped that they could intimidate Apple into doing exactly what they wanted.
There were rumblings about a company that could do this weeks ago. Snowden brought up it was possible, and likely even hit upon the method.
I think the "mysterious third party" absolutely exists. I just think that the plan all along was to compel apple to do this, and then fall back on this if Apple pushed.
As to the possible lying, English isn't my native tongue, but I found the use of the phrase "without compromising any information on the phone" in this statement:
“Our decision to conclude the litigation was based solely on the fact that, with the recent assistance of a third party, we are now able to unlock that iPhone without compromising any information on the phone,” Eileen Decker, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, said in a statement.
at least curious. Googling "no data was compromised" gives me only links that use that in the meaning "third parties did not get access to the data".
So, if that really is what Eileen Decker said, what exactly did she mean?
No, it just means they could unlock the phone without triggering an auto-wipe after 10 incorrect entries. Keep in mind I don't think any way to know if auto-wipe is even enabled on a locked phone... For all we know, they finally tried entering the PIN '1234', and the phone unlocked.
If you did a complete wipe and reset of the phone, you could unlock it but the data would all be gone. Obviously that's not a very useful outcome for them, but it's still "unlocking" the phone.
Maybe, but they didn't actually accomplish any of their real goals—making it easy to force Apple to break their security. This particular phone is immaterial, and Apple can always talk big later about how they patched any of the security holes that the government used, to recover face.
>Maybe, but they didn't actually accomplish any of their real goals—making it easy to force Apple to break their security
Unless one of their real goals was to get the conversation going about creating new laws that would make uncrackable products illegal, without actually testing the limits of existing laws. Because that is what they achieved.
> This particular phone is immaterial, and Apple can always talk big later about how they patched any of the security holes that the government used, to recover face.
That is a nuanced understanding of this issue that most consumers simply do not and will not have. Most will hear nothing other than "the feds can now crack iPhones" and will assume that government will be able to beat any future improvements too.
> Unless one of their real goals was to get the conversation going [...] Because that is what they achieved.
I suppose, but the conversation definitely wasn't moving in their direction. More like they beat a hasty retreat.
> Most will hear nothing other than "the feds can now crack iPhones"
I assume that most people already believe that they can crack iPhones. And it's not like they came out of this process looking good; they created a huge media circus about how they needed Apple to unlock the phone, beating their chests, only to come back with "uh... well, I guess we didn't need to do any of this at all".
There seems to be much more to this beyond the actual capabilty and it doesn't seem the spin 'apple fighting for our rights' which mainstream media loves is the most likely, so I wpuldn't say FBI hasn't accomplished its goal - especially if it was to cast doubt on Apple security, as they're now basically advertised they can do it no matter what. Unless FBI agreed to previous apple request and they did it togheter under cover.
On the other hand, many smaller companies could not have afforded to take this dispute as far as Apple did, so the FBI proved they were willing and able to cause significant final injury to anyone trying to protect their users' privacy. One could look at this case as proof of the ability for the FBI to extort information and cooperation.
>>they hurt Apple's security reputation (most consumers will not understand or care that this happens to be an old iPhone with an old version of iOS - they will just hear or read that an iPhone was cracked)
And? What makes you think most consumers will care that the government cracked an iPhone?
Exactly. At _best_ most people will just say "well, it's the government, _of course_ they can crack it". If it was some 15 year old kid in his bedroom, then that's a different matter...
The DOJ came out on top here, whether they are lying or not.