Details Emerge in Dispute between Apple and FBI
In a call with reporters, as covered by TechCrunch, Apple executives clarified a couple of points in the ongoing dispute between the company and the FBI. First, any tool that met the FBI’s desire for software that would enable the brute force cracking of an iPhone’s passcode would also work on newer iPhones with iOS 8 or iOS 9 and a Secure Enclave coprocessor. That’s because the data in the Secure Enclave is encrypted by the passcode, which provides access to everything on an iPhone. Second, the FBI apparently reset the Apple ID password for the account associated with the iPhone right after taking the iPhone into custody. That prevented any further automatic iCloud backups, which Apple could have turned over to the government.