The iPhone the FBI Couldn't Crack

In February 2016, the FBI asked Apple to break into one of its own iPhones: a blue iPhone 5C that had belonged to one of the San Bernardino attackers. The FBI had a warrant and it had the phone. What it didn't have was the passcode. Apple said no. This is the full story: why the passcode wasn't really the problem (the ten-guess erase and the waiting times), the 1789 law the government used, Tim Cook's letter, a country split down the middle, and the day before the big hearing, when the FBI said "never mind". Then what the Justice Department's own inspector general found, the tiny Australian firm that got in for $900,000, what was actually on the phone, and the arms race that's still going. And the question nobody answered: where does your privacy end, and everyone else's safety begin? Chapters 0:00 The FBI v. one iPhone 0:57 The Phone 3:04 The Order 4:31 No 6:32 The Day Before 7:56 The Outsiders 9:54 It Never Ended 11:25 Where Privacy Ends Four things you can do today 1. Use a longer passcode: six digits minimum, letters are better. Four digits is 10,000 guesses; six is a million. 2. Install updates. The flaw that opened this phone was fixed in one. 3. On iPhone, look at Stolen Device Protection and Advanced Data Protection for iCloud, where available. 4. Know where your backup is and who can open it. It's usually the weakest copy of your data. Sources • Order Compelling Apple, Inc. to Assist Agents in Search, ED 15-0451M (C.D. Cal., Feb. 16, 2016) • Apple, "A Message to Our Customers" (Feb. 16, 2016): https://www.apple.com/customer-letter/ • Pew Research Center (Feb. 22, 2016): 51% said Apple should unlock the phone, 38% said it shouldn't • U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General (March 2018): https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2018/o1803.pdf • The Washington Post (April 14, 2021), on Azimuth Security and the "Condor" exploit chain • Sen. Dianne Feinstein (May 2017), on the $900,000 price • Apple v. Corellium (filed 2019, settled 2023); Pensacola (2019–2020); iOS 18.1 inactivity reboot (2024); Apple on Advanced Data Protection in the U.K. (Feb. 21, 2025) How we made this: the phone, documents, stamps and charts are illustrations made for this video; the court filings shown are stylized, not facsimiles. No step-by-step methods are described. Disclosure: researched and written with help from Claude, a model made by Anthropic. The narrator is a synthetic text-to-speech voice. Original score, made for this video. ⚡ Wiredeep — the tech you use every day, explained. 👉 Subscribe for more! #privacy #iphone #cybersecurity