According to a recent court filing, which was provided to Ars by the Miami Herald, the FBI offered to cover Florida's costs to pay Cellebrite, a well-known Israeli digital forensics firm, to extract data off of one of the suspects’ iPhone 6. The Cellebrite effort was successful.
The case provides a clear look into the efforts that the federal government is willing to go to—even in local, non-terrorism cases—to aid local law enforcement’s attempts to defeat strong encryption.
In the Miami case, according to the Herald, evidence from the newly-unlocked iPhone “seem[s] to show Voigt and her then-boyfriend actively plotting to get $18,000 from a social-media celebrity known as YesJulz, in exchanging for not releasing the video clips to the Internet. ‘We on some Bonnie Clyde shit I couldn’t have choose a Better partner crime lol,’ reads one text sent from Voigt’s boyfriend’s phone.”
In another message, Voigt added in a warning to Wesley Victor: “Change all your passwords in your accs she doesn’t try some slick shit to u.”
The signed warrant and affidavit by a Miami detective outlines that, despite the fact that Voigt and her co-defendant were ordered back in May 2017 by a judge to provide passcodes for their seized iPhones, they have refused. Given that roadblock, Detective Sergio Campos asked Judge Alberto Milián on June 12 to sign off on sending the phone to Cellebrite’s New Jersey facility. The judge did so on the same day.
The Miami case presented a problem that has yet to be fully resolved by courts nationwide: can a person be compelled to give up a password to unlock or decrypt their seized devices, or does that violate the Fifth Amendment right protecting self-incrimination?
As Ars has reported previously, on the federal level, the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers Florida) ruled in 2012 that forced decryption did constitute a violation of a defendant’s Fifth Amendment rights. In 2013, a federal judge refused to force a Wisconsin child pornography suspect to decrypt his laptop. Overall, cases involving decryption are still relatively new and seemingly rare. The first known one only dates back to 2007.In Florida state court, however, the issue of forced decryption previously came up in a 2016 case involving a man accused of taking “upskirt” photos in Sarasota. In State of Florida v. Stahl, a state appellate court ruled in favor of the government and found that the defendant did have to hand over his passcode to local authorities.
This new result in Miami is reminiscent of the 2016 showdown in San Bernardino, California, when the Department of Justice attempted to force Apple to aid the government by building new software to bypass encryption on a seized phone.
Ultimately, the legal issue was never resolved. Instead, the DOJ suddenly announced that a mysterious entity had stepped in to do the job. Later, then-FBI Director James Comey intimated that the agency had paid somewhere around $1 million for the privilege. Cellebrite was initially rumored to have provided the hack, but that remains unconfirmed. The DOJ has never said what, if any, useful information was gleaned from the phone.
Ars will be filing public records requests with the FBI and the Miami-Dade State Attorney in an attempt to learn more about the circumstances involved here and how much money the FBI provided to Cellebrite.
UPDATE Sunday 10:20am ET: Ars has e-mailed Apple for comment. We will update this post when we hear back.
reader comments
131