Just two days after the attempted assassination at former President Donald Trump\u2019s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the FBI announced it \u201cgained access\u201d to the shooter\u2019s phone. The bureau has not disclosed how it broke into the phone \u2014 or what has been found on it \u2014 but the speed with which it did so is significant, and security experts say it points to the increased efficacy of phone-hacking tools.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
In a call with reporters on Sunday, the bureau said field agents in Pennsylvania had tried and failed to break into Thomas Matthew Crooks\u2019 phone. The device was then sent to the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cAlmost every police department in the nation has a device called the Cellebrite\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Cooper Quintin, a security researcher and senior staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that law enforcement agencies have several tools at their disposal to extract data from phones. \u201cAlmost every police department in the nation has a device called the Cellebrite, which is a device built for extracting data from phones, and it also has some capability to unlock phones,\u201d Quintin said. Cellebrite, which is based in Israel, is one of several companies that provides mobile device extraction tools (MDTFs) to law enforcement. Third-party MDTFs vary in efficacy and cost, and the likely FBI has its own in-house tools as well. Last year, TechCrunch<\/em> reported<\/a> that Cellebrite asked users to keep use of its technology \u201chush hush.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt seems reasonable to me that the field office there [in Pennsylvania] wouldn\u2019t have some of the more advanced techniques for breaking into modern phones that they have at Quantico,\u201d Quintin told The Verge<\/em> hours before the FBI announced it had successfully gained access to Crooks\u2019 phone. \u201cI have little doubt that Quantico will be able to break into this phone, whether that\u2019s in-house or whether that\u2019s through using outside help \u2014 like from Cellebrite, for example.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n A 2020 investigation<\/a> by the Washington, DC-based nonprofit organization Upturn found that more than 2,000 law enforcement agencies in all 50 states and the District of Columbia had access to MDTFs. GrayKey \u2014 among the most expensive and advanced of these tools \u2014 costs between $15,000 and $30,000, according to Upturn\u2019s report. Grayshift, the company behind GrayKey, announced in March<\/a> that its Magnet GrayKey device has \u201cfull support\u201d for Apple iOS 17, Samsung Galaxy S24 Devices, and Pixel 6 and 7 devices.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For law enforcement, third-party MDTFs are an effective way to get around tech companies\u2019 hesitance to help break into customers\u2019 phones.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In previous instances of mass shootings or domestic terrorism, the FBI has spent weeks or months trying to break into suspects\u2019 phones. The bureau famously butted heads with Apple in late 2015<\/a> after the company refused to help law enforcement get around the encryption on the San Bernardino, California shooter\u2019s iPhone. Early in the following year, Apple refused a federal court order<\/a> to help the FBI access the shooter\u2019s phone, which the company said would effectively require it to build a backdoor for the iPhone\u2019s encryption software.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe government is asking Apple to hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers,\u201d Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote<\/a> in a February 2016 open letter. The FBI did have access to the a backup of the shooter\u2019s phone that had been uploaded to his iCloud account \u2014 but the last backup appeared to have occurred six weeks before the shooting, hence the FBI\u2019s desire to unlock the phone. In his letter, Cook claimed that the FBI had asked Apple to modify its iOS so passcodes could be input electronically in what he called a \u201cbrute force\u201d attack.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor,\u201d Cook wrote. \u201cWhile we believe the FBI\u2019s intentions are good, it would be wrong for the government to force us to build a backdoor into our products. And ultimately, we fear that this demand would undermine the very freedoms and liberty our government is meant to protect.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Trump \u2014 at the time one of several candidates vying for the Republican presidential nomination \u2014 was among those who demanded that Apple cave to the FBI<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Trump \u2014 at the time one of several candidates vying for the Republican presidential nomination \u2014 was among those who demanded that Apple cave to the FBI<\/a>. \u201cFirst of all, Apple ought to give the security for that phone,\u201d he told the crowd during one of his rallies. \u201cWhat I think you ought to do is boycott Apple until such time as they give that security number.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The FBI dropped its case against Apple<\/a> in March 2016, three months after the shooting \u2014 not because Apple decided to comply with the FBI\u2019s request, but because the bureau had obtained a break-in method from an \u201coutside source\u201d and no longer needed Apple\u2019s assistance. Reuters<\/em> initially reported that the Cellebrite had helped the FBI break into the device, which the bureau never confirmed, though then-director James Comey and Senator Dianne Feinstein did disclose that the FBI spent around $1 million <\/a>to unlock the phone.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In 2021, the Washington Post<\/em> reported<\/a> that the Australian security firm Azimuth Security unlocked the San Bernardino shooter\u2019s phone.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The San Bernardino shooting was not the only instance in which the FBI tried to compel Apple to break into an iPhone on its behalf. After a shooter opened fire at the Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida on December 2019, the FBI asked Apple<\/a> to unlock two iPhones linked to the shooter. After Apple refused, Attorney General William Barr said the company had failed to provide \u201csubstantive assistance\u201d in the case. Apple, for its part, maintained that it \u201cproduced a wide variety of information associated with the investigation,\u201d and turned over \u201cgigabytes of information\u201d to the FBI, including \u201ciCloud backups, account information and transactional data for multiple accounts\u201d related to the shooter. But Apple once again refused to unlock the shooter\u2019s phones.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n