President Trump is calling on Tim Cook's Apple to help investigators access iPhones.
President Trump has waded into the emerging battle between Apple and the FBI over a request for the tech company to unlock the iPhones of the Pensacola Navy base shooting suspect.
Trump took to Twitter to vent his frustration at Apple, tweeting a claim that his office helped the Cupertino-based company on many fronts and yet it refused to unlock the iPhones of serious criminals, including murderers and drug dealers.
The president’s tweet came just a day after Attorney General William Barr also asked Apple to provide more help, claiming it hadn’t offered “substantive” support in the investigation into the Pensacola shooting. The FBI wants Apple to break into two iPhones belonging to Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, the Saudi Royal Air Forces officer who shot dead three people at Naval Air Station Pensacola before being killed by police in December. Alshamrani had two iPhones—a 5 and a 7 model—and one was hit by a bullet in the incident, further complicating matters.
Apple, meanwhile, has repeatedly said that it has helped in the investigation, including providing iCloud data from the suspect's account. It has continued to offer assistance, though has not yet offered to open the devices. It’s unclear if Apple could unlock the devices.
As Forbes has previously reported, there are a number of tools the FBI could use to try to unlock the phones, including iPhone hacking devices from Cellebrite and Grayshift. Both have previously been able to break into and extract data from iPhone models, including the 5 and 7. According to previous reports, the FBI has tried third-party tools, to no avail so far.
When the FBI last asked Apple to unlock a phone, after the San Bernardino terrorist incident in 2015, the feds eventually found a third-party hacker who unlocked the device, in that case an iPhone 5C.
It’s the second time in a matter of months that Trump has caused a stir with Apple. In November he claimed to have opened an Apple factory in Austin, Texas. It turned out the factory had been open since 2013 and was actually run by an Apple third-party contractor, not the company itself.
