While the Department of Justice, US attorney general, and even the president proceed to pressure Apple for additional technical support in unlocking iPhones tied to the naval base shooting in December, a letter exposes that the FBI recently cracked a password-protected iPhone 11. That phone belonged to Lev Parnas, an affiliate of the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who has been arraigned on charges of violating straw and foreign donor bans to funnel money into US elections illegally.
Bloomberg reviews that a letter from government legal professionals to the judge (PDF) showed that the FBI spent two months unlocking the defendant’s iPhone 11. Final week Motherboard proclaimed on text messages and notes that appeared to have been pulled from the iPhone utilizing forensics software program from Cellebrite. It seems that similar to the case of the San Bernardino shooting a few years ago, and the federal government has entry to tools that can allow them to drag data from an iPhone but is inquiring additional help and some backdoor access directly from Apple.