FBI Plans to Keep Apple iPhone-Hacking Method Secret

The Federal Bureau of Investigation plans to tell the White House it knows so little about the hacking tool that was used to open a terrorist’s iPhone that it doesn’t make sense to launch an internal government review about whether to share the hacking method with Apple. The decision, and the technical and bureaucratic justification behind it, would likely keep Apple in the dark about whatever security gap exists on certain models of the company’s phones, apparently.

At issue is a hacking tool FBI director James Comey has said cost the government more than $1 million that was used to open the locked iPhone of Syed Rizwan Farook. The agency is preparing to send a formal notification to the White House in the coming days saying that while the agency bought the hacking tool from the third party, officials aren’t familiar with the underlying code that runs it, apparently. Because of that, the FBI plans to tell the White House, its agents aren’t aware of a software vulnerability that should be reported to the Vulnerabilities Equities Process panel, an interagency group that decides whether to notify software makers of security weaknesses, these people said.