Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has called on Apple to help the FBI unlock iPhones and “foreign apps” belonging to alleged assassination plotters.
As AppleInsider predicted in July 2024, former President Trump has weighed in on the long-running feud between Apple and the FBI. The FBI has repeatedly called for a backdoor to be added to iOS to allow law enforcement access, and Apple has pointed out that this would also create a backdoor for bad actors.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Apple must cooperate with the FBI, who he said had failed to unlock “three apps that were likely foreign-made” on the iPhone of Pennsylvania shooting suspect Thomas Matthew Crooks, according to Fortune magazine.
The fact that it is specifically three “foreign-based apps” that the FBI does not have access to suggests that the FBI may have unlocked the iPhone. Perhaps these apps store the data on their own servers rather than iCloud, which is why the FBI cannot investigate further.
Apple has previously handed over information stored on its iCloud servers to authorities, and previous announcements from the FBI and Secret Service suggest this has already happened.
But if app developers store user data on external servers, Apple doesn’t have physical access to it and no authority to retrieve it.
Trump also said that the alleged assassin, Ryan Wesley Routh, had six cell phones — likely but not certain — that the FBI “could not penetrate as well.”
“They (the FBI) need to get Apple to release the foreign apps,” Trump said at a rally in North Carolina, “and they need to get Apple to release the six phones that belonged to the second madman as well.”
The speech came after the presidential candidate was briefed by U.S. intelligence agencies on reports of assassination plots by Iran, though no public links have been made to the previous incidents.
“If I were president, I would tell the threatening country, in this case Iran, that if they do anything to harm this man, we will blow Iran’s greatest cities and the country itself to smithereens,” he continued.
Apple’s refusal to release iPhones to law enforcement was first made clear when the company denied a request related to the Pensacola mass shooting in 2020. Since then, Apple has continued to defend what it says is users’ right to privacy, and the FBI has continued to try to hack into the iPhones anyway.
