Tech Expert on the FBI Trying to Access the Shooter's Phone

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Thor Shrock with us for a fewminutes. Here. Thor the host of
compute this every Sunday morning at seven, and the Grand Pooba over there are
Shrock innovations. Thor, A goodmorning, good morning, Are you doing
good? I don't know if you'veever been called a pooh ba before,
but you are now you read mymind. I was thinking, you know
that sounds like, don't call mepooh bah. That's my dad, right.

(00:21):
You know, we got the wordlate yesterday or last evening that the
FBI finally got access into the cellphone of the would be assassin Thomas Matthew
Crook. Several issues are important hereand I just wanted to Thor is our

(00:43):
Throck. Thor is our digital guruon all things. We have Fourth Amendment
issues here, We have encryption issueshere. Why did it take two days
for them to get inside that phone? Well, you know, we don't
have a lot of the details yet, but if it was an iPhone,
for example, you know you usethe facial unlocked feature. They don't use

(01:03):
fingerprint scans anymore to unlock the phone. It can also be protected by just
a straight up password. And thechallenge you have with Apple devices specifically is
if you make too many corect incorrectattempts at the password, as any Apple
use your nose first, the phonewill lock you out, so you have
to wait five minutes to try again. Then each time you get it wrong,
it's a longer wait ten minutes,twenty minutes, thirty minutes. And

(01:25):
then after you get it wrong toomany times, the phone can actually wipe
itself as a defensive measure, Sothere's some you have to be careful because
you don't want to lose the evidencethat's in that device when you're trying to
retrieve it. You know, thebigger question here is it looks like they
got from what I'm reading, theygot into the phone after they were able
to get into his computer. Somy guess is that like many people,

(01:48):
he'd be either use the same passwordsand multiple devices, or if he had
an Apple ecosystem, gaining access toone device gains you access to all devices,
so you know, and then youcan reset the password. For example,
I need to reset my I forgotmy password. You can send a
reset and send it to your MacBookand your macbooked and you know allows you
to reset the password. Now,the bigger question what are they trying to

(02:09):
hope to get out of this thing? Because you know, for from everything
that I have seen, this guywas not super active on social media.
He was not a social butterfly.You know maybe from what you know friends
from high school have said quite theopposite. You know, what are they
hoping the gate here? And youknow whatever, everybody's focused on, you
know, the events of the dayand that you know, there was a

(02:30):
report that came out today a timelineof the failures of the you know,
law enforcement and how this happened,and everybody's focused on that. A lot
of that information can be cleared uppretty precisely by having access to these digital
devices. Because either this guy,I mean, he's almost as lucky as
Donald Trump. You know, well, you can randomly just walk seven tenths

(02:53):
of a mile from your van inCamo with a rifle toward the presidential event,
and and you happen to pick theone roof in the entire area that's
a perfect sniper spot. When thekid couldn't even make the high school rifle
team, he picks the perfect sniperspot, puts himself on the roof,
and then gets to take some shotsat the president before he's engaged by counter

(03:14):
snipers. So either this kid isjust amazingly lucky or amazingly good or he
had help. And so then that'sthe next question is who is he talking
to? What communications were there?Is there any way to determine was anybody
else assisting him to get to thisvantage point where he had the opportunity to

(03:35):
do this right and well? Andwill that information and the investigation be transparent.
That's what we need we need toknow. But regarding regarding the issues
here, thora can't the Apple inthe case of Apple, if it's an
iPhone or whatever company, did theynot have the ability to get inside if

(03:57):
it's a if it's a law enforcementemergency. See, this is a this
is a really fine line. Youmight remember I think you had me on
a few years ago about a bomberthat they wanted to get into his iPhone
and Apple said no, and thethe FBI couldn't get into it, and
they ended up hiring some cybersecurity firmthat they could crack it to crack it
for them. So what you havewith these situations, you can't build a

(04:20):
back door because if you put aback door in a device, eventually that
back door is going to be discoveredby unauthorized parties, who of course aren't
going to say anything until they reallyneed it, and then they're going to
just utilize the back door and they'llhave access to everybody's device. So the
back door argument doesn't work. Governmentwants a back door, private industry says
that's not how encryption works. SoApple walks this fine line, this little

(04:43):
bit, this game where Apple can'taccess your device, they can't crack your
encryption, they can't unlock your device, but they can't reset your password.
So for example, we have thisunfortunate situation sometimes in our Omaha service center
where a customer will come in whoseson, daughter, you know, family
members has died for one reason oranother and they want to get into their

(05:06):
Apple computer to get their photos andstuff out of there so they can you
know, go through the data,and they don't know the password and they
can't reset the password, and theperson is deceased, so there's you know,
what do you do. You haveto go into the Apple store with
a certificate of death and then youhave to talk to somebody there, and
then what they do is they can'taccess the password, but they can reset

(05:29):
it to a like a generic password, and then provide you with the generic
password. So while Apple cannot directlyaccess your data or provide your password to
law enforcement, a lot of thiscomes down to how the law enforcement agency
phrases their request. Can you resetthe password is a different question than can
you provide me with the password?Yeah? And a court order is the

(05:53):
only thing that could potentially force themto do that, right. There's no
law that says they have to dothat. No, their policy is they
do not do at So you knowyou I'm borrowing a court order, they
won't do that. Well. Asas Larry's asked on an email, he
says, since it supposedly took twodays for the power of the FBI to
get into that phone, does thatshow that we do have some personal information

(06:15):
protection? I say The answer isyes. Yeah. I've often said that.
You know, I myself am anAndroid user, But you know,
if you're picking a phone based onthe potential for privacy, I trust Apple
a lot more than I trust Google, you know. But but then again,
you know that that Android sure hasso many more features that that are

(06:39):
not locked down. If you keepthat, you know, in an Apple
you're just restricted to what they tellyou you can do, and that's part
of the security. That's part ofwhat makes the phone a more secure platform
in some ways. But as faras security goes, as we've seen here,
whether it's one day or two days, you know they're in. And
the thing I'm sitting here saying tomyself is that you've got this guy's metadata
already. Talk to your friends overat NSA. I'm sure they haven't.

(07:01):
In one of their big server farmsover there, they know who he's been
talking to, but you know,they've been wrapped that access to the device,
so they got their access to it. They're going to be coming through
that data to try to figure outwho he was talking to and what he
was talking about, or what hewas what he was doing with the phone,
or the phone's geolocation data, wherethe phone has been, so that
they can kind of walk backwards throughthe events of the days leading up to

(07:25):
this to determine, you know,what may have motivated him, or you
know, if there was some kindof assistance that happened, or if maybe
somebody else was helping him. Youknow, it's it seems very unlikely that
he was able to accomplish everything thathe accomplished from his perspective on his own.
You're in the NSA knows, heknows who he's been talking too.

(07:47):
They don't need the phone. Wellthat's the thing. The NSA doesn't admit
they know anything about anybody, right, Why about that all the time?
Hey a lot more Where this camefrom my Sunday morning at seven on compute
this, Dora, thank you,appreciate that. Have a good day, you bad