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Comment by af16090 | Hacker News Reader

One thing that I don't think has been covered enough in this whole debate about forcing Apple to unlock the iPhone is that "Farook and his wife destroyed their personal iPhones, and the hard drive from their computer was removed and has never been found"[1]. The iPhone the FBI is after is one that was issued to him by his employer. It seems to me to be very unlikely that Farook and his wife would go to the trouble to destroy all their other electronics but somehow forget to destroy his work phone (assuming his work phone had incriminating information on it in the first place).

[1]: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/02/18/apple-court...

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This is the piece of information that makes it clear to me that this case is not about this phone in particular. The FBI is trying to use an act of terrorism to acquire the tools to hack iPhones. They can't actually expect to find anything valuable on the work phone the attacker chose not to destroy.

"Never let a good crisis go to waste."

And moreover it seems incredibly unlikely that a man planning to commit an act hostile to the US government would discuss that act on a device issued to him by the government (his employer), especially when he also carried a separate personal device.

I agree, this has constantly been understated. The headlines make it seem that the whole case hinges on this phone, which is one of the least likely locations for incriminating data to be located.

I am guessing they have the call records from the phone company and found something interesting enough to go through all this effort.

We dont know what they found in the lake.

What would they get? Best case, there is a contact name associated with a phone number they think is suspicious? Wouldn't that have been backed up on iCloud?

Also, what's the endgame? They want to convict the dead guy? They want to convict the neighbor who sold them guns, maybe?

You think so? It seems disingenuous for you to suggest that when all the evidence points to this phone having nothing useful on it, that this is just a thing the FBI wants to have done for precedent. The FBI has been crowing for backdoors into all our private communications long before this phone became interesting.

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