I wouldn't exclude it, it worked well. Let's not forget that they eventually still unlocked the phone with a similar tool anyway. It's only possible that these tools weren't as readily available on 2015.

Really! They unlocked it in the end?!

I was only following the mainstream news headlines back then... not paying super close attention... but I failed to read that part. I assumed they were never able to access it to this very day.

Along with 99% of the rest of North America who can only read so much about computer security I am sure.

From Wikipedia:

> On March 28, the government announced that the FBI had unlocked the iPhone and withdrew its request.

> The unidentified method used to unlock Farook's phone - costing more than $1 million to obtain - quit working once Apple updated their operating system.

The tools were available at the time, but FBI preferred Apple to compromise their security model instead.

Nothing is perfectly secure, it's just a question of how many resources are required. Clearly, if the FBI wanted to do it, they could spend enough resources to break into any consumer phone.

(Or break into your house)

This does not scale.

The case was primarily an effort of the FBI to weaken device security to make their job easier.

The device was already insecure. It was a case of the FBI asking Apple to use Apple's privileged position on the FBI's behalf.

Yeah because the terrorist used 4 digit pin-number. That's not a military grade password.

If Apple is adding back doors willy nilly why would they execute a parallel marketing campaign centered on privacy at the same time? The more likely reality is that are extremely upset this is happening and being publicized. My personal take is it would be impossible to add back doors to Apple products without whistle blowing. Why does everything have to be a conspiracy these days?

>If Apple is adding back doors willy nilly why would they execute a parallel marketing campaign centered on privacy at the same time?

Are you being sarcastic here?

Because that's exactly what any big corporation focused on profits over people would do.

Exactly that.

Take the money from the people and the money from big brother.

Win, win.

We are a now in a age where people are talking about building their own chips and phones because they don’t trust the commercial products to be secure. I have a feeling the Apple marketing org is less than thrilled about recent news. Also Google no doubt is looking for ways to capitalize on this. They already have the reputation of having security geniuses on par with the NGO group on their payroll

Also a lot of these exploits are buffer overflows. That’s a terrible back door because anyone could find it. If there were back doors it would be things like sharing the seeds to the RNG that generates their private keys or just giving access server side access. But they aren’t doing that because it’s dumb. And if the government already has back doors why would they purchase external tools? But as ever the best argument against the conspiracy is it would impossible to keep secret