The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been unable to crack the encryption on the phone owned by the gunman who opened fire and killed 26 people in a Texas church last week.
“We are unable to get into that phone,” said FBI Special Agent Christopher Combs in a press conference.
He also declined to state what type of phone was used by David Kelley, the gunman who killed himself after the mass shooting.
“I’m not going to describe what phone it is because I don’t want to tell every bad guy out there what phone to buy, to harass our efforts on trying to find justice here,” said Combs.
However, The Washington Postreported that the device was, in fact, an iPhone, but that the agency was not seeking Apple’s assistance. The experts at the FBI’s lab in Quantico, Virginia, are working to find other methods to access the phone’s data either through cloud storage backups or linked laptops.
In conclusion, the fight between the government and phone manufacturers over encryption continues. The U.S. government has made efforts and asked phone makers to weaken their devices’ security, but companies have refused to do so. Last year, Apple refused to unlock and decrypt the San Bernardino gunman’s iPhone. The FBI ended up paying hackers for a vulnerability to access the data on the device.
“With the advance of the technology in the phones and the encryptions, law enforcement, whether it’s at the state, local, or the federal level, is increasingly not able to get into these phones,” said Combs.
He confirmed that the FBI is working hard to get into the phone and will continue to do so until it finds an answer.
Source: Ars Technica
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