As it turned out, the FBI’s own hackers didn’t start working with vendors to find a way to hack into Farook’s iPhone until “the eve” of the FBI’s initial court filing demanding Apple’s assistant on February 16, 2016. Moreover, two different teams within the FBI’s Operational Technology Division (OTD), a department tasked with giving technological assistance to investigations, didn’t communicate with each other to find a solution until late in the investigation, according to the OIG report.The tech team initially helping with the case was the Cryptologic and Electronics Analysis Unit (CEAU). It was only after a meeting on February 11 that another hacking team within the FBI, the Remote Operations Unit or ROU, started looking into it and started contacting contractors and vendors asking for help.Read more: The FBI Is at War With Apple Because It Couldn’t Change Wiretap Law
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We received conflicting testimony regarding whether ROU was part of the early outreach efforts to find a solution to the Farook iPhone problem, and we learned that, unbeknownst to anyone, the ROU Chief had only just begun the process of looking for a possible solution to the problem on the eve of the application for a court order being filed – a filing predicated in material part on the notion that technical assistance from Apple was necessary to search the contents of the device. Further, we obtained other information suggesting that not everyone within OTD was on the same page in the search for a technical solution to the Farook iPhone problem, including varying testimony from OTD managers on whether there was a dividing line discouraging collaboration between the units that predominantly do criminal and national security work in OTD, the question asked of internal and external partners during CEAU’s outreach, whether vendors should have been part of CEAU’s outreach effort, and the significance of ROU and the [REDACTED] on issues relevant to the Farook iPhone problem. Further, the CEAU Chief may not have been interested in researching all possible solutions and instead focused only on unclassified techniques that could readily be disclosed in court and that OTD and its partner agencies already had in-hand. We believe all of these disconnects resulted in a delay in seeking and obtaining vendor assistance that ultimately proved fruitful, and that as a result of the belatedly-obtained technical solution, the government was required to withdraw from its previously stated position that it could not access the iPhone in this critical case, and by implication in other cases, without first compelling cooperation from the manufacturer.