Three South African investigators are racing against the clock to secure crucial information from Oscar Pistorius’ iPhone 5 before his trial starts on Monday.
The detectives have flown to Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California to request help in unlocking the iPhone’s passcode, as prosecutors want to access its SMS and WhatsApp messages as evidence for the trial.
Sure seems like they waited ’til the last possible minute for this.
They could have saved themselves the airfare and just asked the NSA.
I sure hope Apple tells them to pound sand.
…for the complete phone contents.
One chilling point in the story is how the authorities conflate “viewing pR0n” with “…relationship problems severe enough to make one capable of murder.”
They won’t likely need to. The way iOS is set up there is no database of passcodes and no way to bypass the lock down protocol.
The best Apple will be able to tell them is, IF this guy ever hooked his phone to a laptop and they have that exact laptop in their possession they can try to make a backup and then restore the phone etc. Just like any user can attempt. But if Oscar was smart he never connected the two and no random computer will work.