Edward Snowden has rubbished the FBI’s public position on the San Bernardino case, countering that the organisation could easily access the iPhone of one of the shooters if it so wished.
The FBI has been embroiled in a federal battle with Apple, who are refusing to unlock the encrypted iPhone of Syed Rizwan Farook.
Snowden has said the FBI’s claims that Apple has "exclusive technical means" is "bulls***" and that the bureau has been capable of doing so “since the '90s".
Speaking from exile in Russia via Google Hangouts, the famous NSA whistleblower was addressing the Blueprint for a Great Democracy conference in Washington DC.
Following up on the thread later on Twitter, he said:
The global technological consensus is against the FBI. Why? Here's one example: https://t.co/t2JHOLK8iU #FBIvsApple https://t.co/mH1ZXOOQ1E
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) March 8, 2016
The link supplied details how the FBI would go about infiltrating the phone without Apple’s aid:
"All the FBI needs to do to avoid any irreversible auto erase is simple to copy that flash memory (which includes the Effaceable Storage) before it tries 10 passcode attempts. It can then re-try indefinitely, because it can restore the NAND flash memory from its backup copy”.