By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said the FBI could have easily unlocked an iPhone and called the bureau’s fight with Apple a sham, CNBC reports.
“The FBI says Apple has the ‘exclusive technical means’,” to unlock the phone, Snowden said during a discussion at Common Cause’s Blueprint for Democracy conference in Washington on Wednesday.
“Respectfully, that’s bullshit,” Snowden said.
Snowden explained that the FBI could have bypassed the iPhone’s auto-erase function but failed to do so.
Other technology experts backed up those claims, but said the FBI made a big error by trying to reset the iCloud password.
CNBC wrote:
Even so, security researchers say there are other options, like “de-capping” the phone’s memory chip to access it outside the phone (which Snowden has also mentioned), or resetting the phone’s internal counter so that you can guess the passwords as many times as you want. Those techniques are hard and expensive and could destroy the phone, experts say — but have worked in the past.
