FBI ‘optimistic’ it can hack into shooter’s iPhone

Justice Department officials said Thursday that they are hopeful investigators will be able to break into the locked iPhone of San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook without Apple’s help.

{mosads}“We’re optimistic,” FBI Director James Comey said at a news conference.

Apple is currently opposing a court order demanding that it help investigators break into the phone by disabling a security feature that erases the device’s data after 10 failed attempts to enter the pass code.

But on Monday, the FBI called off the first hearing in the case, saying that a “non-governmental third party” had found a possible method to break into the device without Apple’s help.

The high-profile legal case has drawn attention to the issue, Comey said Thursday, “stimulating a marketplace of creative people all over the world.”

“Lots of folks have come to us. It looks like we may have one that might work out,” he said.

Reports emerged earlier in the week that the Israeli mobile forensics firm Cellebrite is helping the agency hack into the phone used by Farook, who with his wife killed 14 people in California last year. But whether that company is the  “non-governmental third party” in question remains unknown.

If the FBI succeeds in breaking into the phone without Apple’s help, the tense legal battle over the phone could come to an abrupt end.

“At this point it’s really too early to say how that’s going to work out,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch said.

But Comey said Thursday that even if the FBI is successful in cracking into the phone, a larger debate remains over the degree of access law enforcement should have to encrypted communications.

“Even if this particular technique makes that go away, that litigation, we still have to as a country resolve this conflict,” Comey said.