Why the arms race between the FBI and Apple is only getting started
The bureau in recent years has launched a recruiting blitz to attract employees with cyber expertise, and the National Science Foundation has even made scholarship money available to students who study cybersecurity and later work in government. But former FBI officials said the bureau will always face an uphill battle against private firms, which can offer much more money, a less rigorous code of conduct and more opportunities to do creative work.
Ernest Hilbert, a former FBI special agent focusing on cybercrimes, said the bureau had lost tech talent in recent years. “The most an agent can make is 180K,” he said. “That’s like a starting salary in the private sector. You have a big push by private industry to pull out these individuals.”
That bureau officials were able to access Syed Rizwan Farook’s phone allows the government to avoid — at least for now — a showdown with Apple over the extent U.S. law compels the company to help in a criminal investigation.
FBI hacks iPhone: Does this make your phone less private?
The FBI is under no obligation to tell the public how it defeated Apple's security measures, but the agency could be required to tell the company if the government exploited a defect in the company's security protocols in order to gain access.
The policy that governs such disclosures is known as the "Vulnerabilities Equities Process," according to Andrew Crocker, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group. The EFF sued to make the 13-page policy public in 2014 and won access to the document earlier this year.
Crocker said the policy is weighted toward disclosure, but the government has successfully fought to keep such details secret before.