The FBI may have achieved its objective of hacking the iPhone 5C belong to the main accused in the San Bernardino terror attack case though not before they have parted with a cool $1.34 million.
The figure still is subjective as the best that FBI Director James Comey revealed is that it’s greater than what he would earn for the remainder of his term as the head of the premier investigative agency.
Now considering that he makes $183,300 per year – figure pertaining to January 2015 – the amount that he is set to earn during the remainder of the 7 years and 4 months that he will be at the helm of affairs at FBI and be assuming that he won’t be getting any bonus or a raise in between is $1.34 million.
“A lot. More than I will make in the remainder of this job, which is seven years and four months for sure,” Comey said at the Aspen Security Forum in London. “But it was, in my view, worth it.”
Law enforcement officials who wished to remain anonymous though stated Syed Farook’s iPhone 5C did not have any contacts or messages that would have provided for new leads in the case. However, given that Farook did not make any contact to any third-party following the terrorist incident is proof enough that he and his wife were acting solo and had no active support from family or friends.
While the successful hacking led the FBI to drop its case against Apple, authorities continue to be wary of the increased adoption of strong encryption technologies in the public domain that they feel will allow criminals to get along with their subversive activities without the fear of getting detected. Case in point is the end-to-end encryption technology that WhatsApp or Viber has applied to their respective platforms.
“There are a significant number of criminals and terrorists that use WhatsApp, and that’s a problem,” Comey said.
Also, while the hacking tool used to the iPhone 5C will also be effective against other iPhone 5C devices running iOS 9, what should still be worrisome for the FBI is that the tool is largely ineffective for other device or running a different version of iOS.
That is not all for Apple too is set to announce the next iOS 10 at the upcoming WWDS event. Needless to say, iOS 10 will have the best anti-hacking elements built into it thereby making it almost immune to any hacking attempts. It will be interesting to see how the FBI responds.
