FBI agents had to hack into Lev Parnas’s iPhone, prosecutors alleged in a late Tuesday letter, after the Giuliani associate refused to provide them with a password.
Trumpism:
“Where a man like Parnas is immeasurably more valuable to the very existence of the United States as a representative Democracy than the United States Attorney General.”
said without snark.
Shoulda called Rudy.
I hear he’s a technology expert - especially with smart phones.
He’s got the fastest butt dials in the West.
Right, they could get him to sit on it, it would immediately release everything it had or at least I know I would.
Probably because LowBarr was probably trying to wipe the phone, not unlock it.
I love the smell of DoJ embarrassment and ad hoc justifications in the morning.
I do miss the old Hamhock justifications though…
They were always entertaining…
This is irony of the highest order. I expect Parnas will get some jail time but Barr deserves to spend the rest of his life in jail.
Observing the man’s physiognomy, this is likely to be a minimum sentence.
I’ve dealt with this sort of thing several times. It is not uncommon for lawyers to have no idea how to open a forensic image and the need to transfer large files from one group to another can be a logistical problem. I don’t think there was necessarily any bad action on either side of this issue from what has been revealed, just the complexities of modern technology. A lawyer without a technical staff to deal with analyzing a phone image; a prosecutor’s office with process to follow trying to get a large file securely from their office to the lawyer. Now how each side is spinning it is another story.
“Does this orange jumpsuit make my ass look fat?”
Did they try “password”? How about “1234”?
Another unintended consequence of the mob-in-charge- revelation of the sheer incompetence of the FBI
Parnas was falling all over himself to let people know that he was afraid of Barr. In fact, Maddow did not pursue it as much as she could have…probably because we will get there soon enough.
Every living American should be just as afraid of Barr as Parnas…
It is not so much incompetence of the FBI, it is two things: The WH trying to make folks think that the FBI is incompetent (as in, “you can’t believe anything they say…”) and - The WH would like to force Tim Apple to create a backdoor for them.
You’re talking about the Federal Bureau of Investigation here gilgamesh and not some podunk prosecutors office in Muskogee, Oklahoma. They have some of the most highly qualified IT experts on the planet. If they had trouble unlocking Parnas’s devices with all their expertise then I fear they don’t have as much expertise as we need to guard against IT crimes. God dammit I hate it when I trust a Ukranian/American goon more than I trust the FBI/DOJ under Bill Lowbarr.
A competent FBI would have the means to open it worked out. Do you really think this is the first time they gave encountered this?
On the other hand, if I understand the article correctly, Parnas was not able to open his own iPhone. If I couldn’t open mine would Apple provide assistance? I think so. Seems to be something missing in the story.
The best technologist don’t tend to work for the government. Unlocking an iPhone is very, very hard. Plenty of examples where it could not be done in high profile cases. It’s not a matter of just having a smart IT guy on board. If the phone was fully patched, it is quite a credit to them that they got in at all. But the back and forth here seems to be about getting the decrypted image to his lawyer and his lawyer being able to make sense of it. Reading such an image is complicated. If you are going to boot it at all you need an emulator. More commonly you need specialized tools to extract the stored photos, texts and logs. Getting the image securely to a lawyer who doesn’t have a secure server to upload it to or isn’t prepared to hand over a harddrive is a common logistical hurdle. Handed back a hard drive with a 128 GB binary file named badguyphone.img would present most lawyers a real challenge. I am just saying the problems they describe are not anybody’s fault. This type of thing is just hard and people trained in law are rarely adequately trained in digital forensics and unless they are part of a big firm probably don’t have someone on staff.
Clear as mud as far as I can tell.