The FBI said on Monday afternoon that it was able to access the data on the iPhone that belonged to the San Bernardino shooter. As a result, it dropped its case asking the courts to force Apple to help.
The FBI was brief in its two-paragraph announcement, which came in the form of a court filing. In a call with reporters on Monday, a government official did not offer details about the hack or the group that helped.
But it raises an important question: If the FBI, with the help of an outside party, could access the contents of the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone, does that mean the FBI can access every iPhone?
One expert doesn't think so.
Eli Dourado, a research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and director of its Technology Policy Program, told Marketplace's Morning Report on Tuesday that the FBI may have been able to access the contents of the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone because it's a relatively older iPhone without the latest security tech.
The shooter had an iPhone 5C, one of the candy-colored iPhones that Apple introduced in 2013. It lacks what's called a Secure Enclave, which Dourado described as "essentially a little computer inside the iPhone that’s been walled off from the existing iPhone firmware."
The Secure Enclave has come with every iPhone since the iPhone 5S in 2013 and onward. Along with performing other functions, it stores fingerprint information that's used to unlock phones that have Apple's Touch ID fingerprint sensors.
"Because the San Bernardino iPhone did not have the Secure Enclave on it, that may be what enabled the third party company to help the FBI get in," Dourado said on Marketplace.
Newer phones, like the iPhone 5S, 6, 6S, and recently announced SE, all have a Secure Enclave. "It’s possible that the technique used by this company won't work on [these newer phones]," Dourado said. "So it very much depends on the specific details of the phones that are in question.
