A Republican on the House Judiciary Committee lectured Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey on his lack of knowledge about technology during a hearing on Tuesday.
“Is the burden so high on you that you could not defeat this product either through source code or some other means?” Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., asked in reference to the FBI’s effort to unlock an iPhone 5C used by perpetrators in California’s December terrorist attack.
“We have engaged all parts of the U.S. government to see [if] anybody has a way short of asking Apple to do it, with a 5C running iOS 9, to do this, and we do not,” Comey replied.
“Does the 5C have a nonvolatile memory in which all of the encrypted data and the selection switches for the phone settings are all located in the encrypted data?” Issa asked.
“I don’t know,” Comey said.
“Well, it does,” Issa said. “Take my word for it for now. That means you can in fact remove from the phone all of its memory … its disk drive if you will, and set it over here, and have a true copy of it, that you could conduct [an] infinite number of attacks. Let’s assume you can make an infinite number of copies once you make one copy, right?”
“I have no idea,” Comey replied.
“You can make 10,000 copies of this chip, this nonvolatile memory hard drive, then you can perform as many attacks as you want on it,” Issa said. “You’ve asked specifically Apple to defeat the finger code so you can attack it automatically, so you don’t have to punch in codes.
“The question is, how can you come before this committee, and before a federal judge, and demand that somebody else invent something if you can’t answer the questions [about whether] your people have tried this?” Issa said before his allotted time abruptly ended.
Related Story: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2584338
Issa, the richest member of Congress, is a former CEO of Directed Electronics and a former chairman of the Consumer Electronics Association. He also chairs the House subcommittee on the Internet.
