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Comment by taildrop | Hacker News Reader

This might be great for the FBI right up until they actually try to use the evidence in court. The defense attorney can claim (rightly so) that unless they can examine the unlock method to verify it doesn't tamper with any of the data on the phone, the evidence is inadmissible.

The only way the FBI will be able to use this data in court is if they turn the process over to the defense so they can have the process independently verified. Since the article states that they don't have access to the "technical details" of the hack, they have no way to prove the method doesn't manipulate the data on the device.

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This was never intended to be used in court - the guy who carried the phone is dead, as is his wife and partner-in-slaughter.

Information obtained from the phone could have been used to implicate a third party, though.

That's what parallel construction is for :(

If they already had all the logs of everything happening on the Internet and cell networks for that device, why even go through hacking the device?

My understanding is that the FBI wanted to see which, if any, third party messaging services the phone's owner was using and his usernames so they could serve a subpoena to those services.

To set a precedent.

I don't even really trust that they _did_ hack it. Could just be a safe way out when they realized apple wouldn't back down.

This! Why does everyone believe this FBI PR bullshit? It's classic propaganda to save face.

At which point they'd trot out some parallel construction claims and make the 3rd party stuff admissible.

The information might not be admissible to implicate someone, but it should still count as probable cause (IANAL). So they could legally use it to then search whoever may be implicated, and any evidence from that should be admissible.

There's no claim that they violated any rights searching the phone (which after all belonged to them), but that the process may be unreliable. That means it's still enough for probable cause, or that seems plausible to me. I don't know whether this is right.

Edit: I did some searching, and this seems to be correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taint_(legal)

>The most common of such usage is with reference to evidence, testimony, identification by witnesses, or confessions that have been obtained by law enforcement illegally.

If it's obtained legally, it doesn't count as tainted. http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/tainted+eviden... has the same illegal language.

>> "...the phone (which after all belonged to them)..."

Pretty sure the phone was the property of whomever was named as the dead guy's inheritor in his will. Absent a will it should have gone to the next of kin or probate court or similar. One place the dead guy's property should not go is to the FBI. That's not how property rights work.

I recognize that in practice the FBI will do as they damn well please, but in principle we do have laws for this.

Warrants trump property rights here, and on top of that it was the county's phone, not the dead guy's.

http://gizmodo.com/the-san-bernardino-terrorists-icloud-pass...

> Technically, the iPhone in question (the one the FBI is demanding that Apple unlock) was purchased by the San Bernardino Department of Health. And as security researcher Christopher Soghoian has pointed out on Twitter, the Department tried to reset the phone’s iCloud password remotely in the hours after the attack. The department hoped to gain information from a possible back-up of the phone to iCloud. Instead, it rendered the account useless.

My point is that a warrant allowing seizure of evidence does not transfer legal ownership to the the FBI. If the county owned the phone, then fine. It remained the county's, not the FBI's, regardless of any investigative warrants.

Assuming there was ever any useful evidence on it.

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