A federal judge ruled Saturday that the FBI does not have to disclose the name of the vendor, and how much it was paid by the government for a hacking tool that unlocked the iPhone of a terrorist behind the San Bernardino, California attacks that left 14 people dead.
The development of the unlocking tool ended what was one of the biggest legal showdowns in the technology space, one in which Apple was fighting a judge's order last year to provide the FBI with software to enable investigators to unlock the iPhone 5C of Syed Rizwan Farook. Farook was one of two shooters behind the December, 2015 attack at a San Bernardino County facility that left him—and wife Tashfeen Malik—dead. Apple had argued that the law didn't require it to create software, or a "backdoor," to enable the government to unlock its customers' encrypted devices.
But ahead of a major March, 2016 court hearing in which Apple was to contest the order forcing it to cooperate with the FBI, the government dropped its demand and announced it had obtained a method to unlock the iPhone from an "outside party."
Six months later, The Associated Press, USA Today, and Vice Media sued the FBI in a bid to force the agency to reveal the name of the vendor that cracked the iPhone. The Freedom of Information Act lawsuit also demanded to know how much taxpayers paid for the crack.
US District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the District of Columbia agreed with the government that naming the vendor could put the company and its tools susceptible to a "cyberattack."
"It is logical and plausible that the vendor may be less capable than the FBI of protecting its proprietary information in the face of a cyberattack," the judge ruled. "The FBI's conclusion that releasing the name of the vendor to the general public could put the vendor's systems, and thereby crucial information about the technology, at risk of incursion is a reasonable one."
The court also agreed with the government that divulging the price the government paid could harm national security.
"Releasing the purchase price would designate a finite value for the technology and help adversaries determine whether the FBI can broadly utilize the technology to access their encrypted devices," Judge Chutkan ruled.
The mobile forensics firm Cellebrite of Israel was one company mentioned as possibly the vendor behind the crack, the Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth reported last year.
In April 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey suggested that his agency paid more than $1.3 million to an unnamed company to unlock the iPhone 5C at the center of the dispute. Yet the government has never confirmed the identity of the vendor, or how much it was paid.
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