Alwaght- Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey said last Thursday that what the agency paid to get into the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters was worth every penny.
According to Reuter's calculations, the FBI paid $1.3 million to get into the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters, the largest ever publicized fee for a hacking job.
When asked how much the FBI paid for the software that reportedly did the trick Comey replied: “A lot. More than I will make in the remainder of this job, which is seven years and four months for sure…But it was, in my view, worth it.”
How credible is this story though?
For the FBI to publicize its expenditure, there must be an aim behind it.
At first the FBI ordered Apple to help it unlock the phone. But the latter refused to weaken its encryption feature for the government. The company has apparently been part of a legal battle waged by the FBI, or so we have been told.
The Justice Department said in March it had unlocked the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone with the help of an unidentified third party and dropped its case against Apple Inc.
However, what is more dubious is the fact that the Feds said they found nothing of value in the phone used by one of the shooters.
This may mean that the entire show was just another propaganda campaign. The FBI has a long record of spying bother on foreign soil and within the United States. A “third party” may not even be needed to hack an iPhone. Numerous documents have revealed by whistle-blowers and even by the US government itself that such hacking jobs are the simplest examples of the illegal measure that the FBI is privileged with to achieve its objectives.
US history is rife with illegal FBI activities from plots to topple governments, even funding terrorist organization, to fuelling sectarian and ethnic wars overseas.
After the FBI said it will be able to use the same software on other 5C iPhones running IOS 9 software, the case raised debate over whether the agency will haphazardly intrude upon the public’s privacy under the pretext of protecting the public with about bout 10 million 5C iPhones in use in the United States.
The American civil liberties union has condemned government agencies’ surveillance policies that have intruded upon citizens’ privacy in the name of national security.
“The government’s collection of this sensitive information is itself an invasion of privacy. But its use of this data is also rife with abuse. Innocuous data is fed into bloated watchlists, with severe consequences—innocent individuals have found themselves unable to board planes, barred from certain types of jobs, shut out of their bank accounts, and repeatedly questioned by authorities.”
“Once information is in the government’s hands, it can be shared widely and retained for years, and the rules about access and use can be changed entirely in secret without the public ever knowing,” the union adds.
As attacks around the world are on the rise, the FBI which has the technological advancement to hack just about anything, as well as surveillance hawks have escalated their rhetoric to use those attacks as excuses to end to the private use of encryption and boost government surveillance.
