FBI paid more than $1.3M to hack terrorist’s iPhone

The FBI paid private hackers more than $1.3 million for custom software allowing investigators to break into the locked iPhone used by a terrorist in last year’s San Bernardino, Calif., attack, Director James Comey indicated on Thursday.

The bureau paid “a lot” of money, Comey said at an Aspen Security Forum event in London on Thursday, without disclosing the specific price tag.

{mosads}“More than I will make in the remainder of this job, which is seven years and four months, for sure.”

The FBI director is paid $183,300 per year, according to federal salary system records.

Over the course of the remainder of his term, which ends in July of 2023, he will be paid more than $1.3 million.

The payment “was, in my view, worth it” Comey said on Thursday, “because it’s a tool that helps us with [an iPhone] 5c running iOS 9, which is a bit of a corner case.”

The FBI has declined to say who developed a program to bypass security mechanisms on the phone, but The Washington Post has reported that it paid a one-time fee to an outside group that was not Cellebrite, the Israeli hacking firm initially suspected of coming to the FBI’s assistance.

The FBI turned to an outside party after Apple challenged a court order to break into terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook’s work phone by developing new software that would bypass a pair of security mechanisms. Protections on the phone would have otherwise deleted the data after an incorrect passcode was entered 10 times and created a slight delay between each successive passcode attempt.

The standoff promised to turn into a blockbuster case pitting the FBI against one of the world’s most profitable companies, but it became surprisingly anticlimactic after the outside firm came to the FBI’s aid.

The media fireworks about the case “stimulated a bit of a marketplace around the world that didn’t exist before,” Comey said on Thursday.

“Somebody approached us from outside the government and said, ‘We think we’ve come up with a solution,’” he added. “And we tested it and tested it and tested it, and then we purchased it.”

Though private hackers came to the FBI’s rescue with the high profile standoff in San Bernardino, the bureau has rejected that paying outsiders is a model for the future. 

“To my mind, that would be a regrettable place to be,” Comey said.

The program allowing investigators to access the terrorist’s iPhone is only believed to work on the specific model used by Farook: an iPhone 5c using the iOS 9 operating system.

According to reports, FBI investigators used data on the iPhone to rule out any suggestions that Farook and his wife were coordinating with extremist groups.  

Comey and other law enforcement officials have worried that the increasing proliferation of encrypted messaging systems, which prevent people from accessing users’ data, empowers terrorists and criminals to evade government agents.

The recent announcement that messaging platform WhatsApp would automatically encrypt the messages of its billion users, for instance, is a “huge concern,” Comey said. 

“That’s a living example — as the Apple case was in San Bernardino — of the problem we call ‘going dark,'” he said. 

“There are over a billion users of WhatsApp, and there are a significant number of terrorists and criminals who use WhatsApp,” Comey added. “It’s wonderful for human rights activists or people who are in despotic regimes who want protection. All that makes good sense to me.

“But it comes with that significant cost.”