Yes, FBI Now Opening iPhones With Dead People's Fingerprints

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The FBI used the fingerprints of Abdul Razak Ali Artan , the terrorist who attacked Ohio State University in 2016, when he had already died to unlock his mobile phone in order to get more information about him for the investigation of the attack.

This is what Bob Moledor has revealed to Forbes magazine . Moledor is a forensic specialist in the FBI and claims that this was the first case in which the body used the finger of a dead person to try to unlock an iPhone.

They failed to break the phone's defenses , however. It is not clear if the iPhone in question was not compatible with the Touch ID technology (the one used by Apple to recognize fingerprints), if the terrorist had not registered his fingerprints or if the fact that the finger corresponded to someone dead was disturbing in some way. way to the recognition of it.

Even so, the feds did manage to obtain information from the device (it is not clear what model it was) after analyzing it in a forensic laboratory. The recovered data, says Moledor, were key to resolving the investigation of the terrorist and whether he acted alone or had more people with him.

Although the FBI was not successful in its first test with this macabre method, that does not mean that others have not succeeded. Citing sources close to the police and federal bodies of New York and Ohio, Forbes points out that unlocking phones with fingerprints is currently a fairly common practice . It has been used in cases of drug overdose according to a source, which would have helped to find the trafficker who supplied them.

Modern smartphones have acquired quite a bit of robustness in recent years, either due to advanced unlocking systems using biometric data (fingerprint, facial or iris recognition) or because the encryption used to protect user data has advanced a lot.

In the past, the FBI paid a very high sum of money ( around 800,000 euros ) for unlocking a terrorist's iPhone. At first, they asked Apple to deactivate the protections of the device, something that caused a very tense clash with the federal body.

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Forbes

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