iPhone

Reporting from Washington — The FBI’s race to hack into the cellphone of slain San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook was hindered by poor internal communication, but officials did not mislead Congress about their technological capabilities, according to an inspector general’s report released Tuesday.

After the December 2015 terror attack, the FBI waged a high-profile public fight to force Apple Inc. to unlock the iPhone, even going to court in a case that pitted national security against digital privacy.

The watchdog report opens a window into the shadowy units inside the FBI that try to hack into computers, and the internal tensions between technicians engaged in national security investigations and those working on criminal cases.

One official was unhappy after the bureau hired an outside technology company to help it unlock the phone, the report said, because that undercut the legal battle against Apple.

“Why did you do that for?” the report quotes the official as saying.

More than two years after the struggle over Farook’s phone, the FBI says the problem of encrypted devices is more difficult than ever. The method used to hack Farook’s iPhone 5c — which cost the FBI more than $1 million — quit working as soon as Apple updated the phones.

In 2017, the FBI was unable to access data on 7,775 devices seized in investigations, according to director Christopher Wray.

“This problem impacts our investigations across the board,” Wray said in January at a speech at a cybersecurity conference, calling it “an urgent public safety issue.”

On Dec. 2, 2015, Farook, a health department worker for San Bernardino County, and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, attacked a holiday party for Farook’s co-workers, killing 14 people and injuring many others. The couple was killed in a shootout with police.

The FBI, trying to figure out whether anyone else was involved in the plot, thought that Farook’s county government-issued cellphone might have the answer. In February, the bureau announced that its technicians were unable to get into the iPhone, which they feared had been set up with a security feature by Farook that would permanently destroy encrypted data after 10 unsuccessful login attempts.

The bureau asked Apple to write software that would disarm that security feature, allowing agents to keep trying codes until one worked, but the company refused. Tim Cook, the company’s CEO, said such a backdoor could compromise security for Apple customers.

“[T]he U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create,” he said in a statement at the time.

The dispute ended up in federal court, as the government sought an order forcing Apple to comply.

Then-FBI Director James B. Comey, in testimony to Congress on Feb. 9 and March 1, 2016, said the bureau was unable to get into the phone without Apple’s help. Amy Hess, then the FBI’s executive assistant director in charge of the technology division, said the same thing in her testimony.

But inside the bureau, even though top officials had ordered a “full court press,” not everybody was working on the problem, the inspector general found.

The digital forensic experts at the bureau’s Cryptographic and Electronic Analysis Unit had tried and failed to get into the phone. But the leader of another squad, the Remote Operations Unit, said he never learned about the issue until a staff meeting in February. He started contacting the unit’s stable of hackers to see whether anybody had a solution.

That supervisor said he believed he wasn’t asked for help sooner because the FBI had “a line in the sand” that blocked the unit’s classified hacking techniques from being used in domestic criminal cases.

“He said this dividing line between criminal and national security became part of the culture in [the technology division] and inhibited communication,” the report says. Other officials told the inspector general that no such line existed.

As it happened, the report found, one of the bureau’s hacking outfits had been working on cracking the iPhone for months and was close to a solution.

The FBI called off the court fight on March 28, saying it no longer needed Apple’s help.

The FBI eventually found that Farook’s phone had information only about work and revealed nothing about the plot.

After the outside vendor surfaced, the cryptographic unit chief “became frustrated that the case against Apple could no longer go forward,” the report says. Hess said the bureau had viewed the Farook phone as “the poster child case” that could help it win the larger political struggle to access encrypted devices.

The inspector general’s inquiry began after Hess reported concerns about the internal conflicts and said she was worried that FBI staff had deliberately kept quiet about their capabilities and allowed Comey and her to give false testimony to Congress.

That wasn’t the case, the inspector general found, because the bureau hadn’t figured out how to crack the phone at the time of those hearings. Through a spokesman, Hess, now special agent in charge of the FBI’s Louisville office, declined to comment.

The FBI said it agreed with the recommendations in the report and said it is now setting up a new unit to consolidate resources and improve communication between people working on encryption issues. Communications problems also were addressed through “a change in leadership” of the units involved, the bureau said.

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As a guitarist, Brian Baker has punk rock and hardcore credentials that are unparalleled. From effectively launching “hardcore” as a genre with Minor Threat when he was a teenager to bringing in the more melodic side of the scene with Dag Nasty and then joining Bad Religion in the mid ’90s, it’s hard to argue that any guitarist has been more influential to their scene than Baker.

“I think I just have a knack for being at the right place at the right time,” Baker says when asked about his contributions to the aforementioned legendary bands. “The key is to respect that legacy and not f— it up. I understand it’s a big deal to a lot of people — much more than it is to me. I’m just the guy who’s playing guitar, but I’ve been fortunate enough to be in bands that have been foundational for a lot of people. I think about that when I get on stage every day. I want to do a great job every time. As long as I’m able to still deliver a performance that I have respect for, hopefully other people will too.”

Standing at a high-top table under a white awning backstage at Riot Fest (Chicago’s massive punk rock festival where most of the acts are either friends of Baker or inspired by one or more of his bands) after nearly a half-century of allegedly just happening upon one iconic band after another, Baker recently released a new project — one that he’s worked on for almost 20 years during his ongoing run with Bad Religion.

A shot of Baker’s guitars on a wood pallet.

(Brian Baker)

Every time the legendary Los Angeles punk band goes on the road, Baker (like most touring musicians) finds himself with entirely too much time to kill before and after their nightly performances. To fill those long hours in strange cities, the 60-year-old D.C. native often turns to the piece of technology that so many use to occupy their free time, his smartphone. But rather than mindlessly scrolling social media or watching YouTube videos, Baker discovered a new passion for photography, constantly using each and every camera lens on the iPhones that have been in his pocket since the original released in the late 2000s.

Until recently, the fruits of Baker’s photography hobby had effectively only existed on his personal Instagram. That was until things started falling into place (“Like many things in my career,” Baker says, consistent in his refusal to take credit for the majority of his successes) for him to release some of his favorite photos as a book, appropriately titled “The Road” (released Nov. 4 via Akashic Books).

A mug shot of Baker’s first band, D.C. hardcore pioneers Minor Threat.

(Brian Baker)

“My wife suggested for a long time that people might want to look at my photographs, and I was like ‘OK, that’s great,’ but never really thought about it,” Baker says, his bandmates and other longtime friends circulating through Chicago’s Douglass Park. “Eventually, a good friend of ours named Jennifer Sakai — who’s a great photographer and has made books in the past — made a mock-up from my Instagram of what a book could look like. I wasn’t looking to make a book, but she basically presented a finished product to me, so I contacted a guy I went to elementary school with, Johnny Temple — who plays [bass] in Girls Against Boys and Soulside and has a publishing company. Much like my more successful rock bands, I walked in after everyone did all the work, and now I’m just going to coattail it.”

With or without the new book, Baker says his time-killing love of photography was born out of the veteran guitarist feeling as though he was forgetting too much and missing some of his key memories from his time on tour. Once he gave up drinking, Baker realized that he needed a way to embrace the 20+ hours each day he wasn’t spending on the stage or getting ready. He started filling his days with long walks and visits to his favorite locales — old churches, interesting buildings, graveyards (“That’s not the goth in me saying this,” Baker jokes) and anywhere else where he entertain himself away from people. And rather than trying to tell the story of the last 18 years through his iPhone camera, he’s happy just documenting those certain moments and “a lot of different ways to spend your time” in “The Road.”

“I used to take a film camera on tour, and I’d shoot a couple rolls and then forget about the camera and leave it at the hotel or something,” Baker says. “I didn’t really do a good job of being a photographer, because I’m not a photographer. I’m just a guy with a cellphone, but having the phone always on me, I just kept taking pictures of stuff for no real reason. It was like ‘Hey, look at this weird thing’ or “Look what we ate tonight” or “That church is f— up” with no intention of it being a collection or anyone really seeing it beyond my friends and family. Eventually, I got an Instagram account and some of the stuff would go there, but I’m not really a social media maven either.”

Bad Religion bassist Jay Bentley playing a bass.

(Brian Baker)

Aside from his photography skills, the release of “The Road” has also allowed Baker to flex his storytelling muscles at the various bookstores, record shops and more that he’s hitting this fall (including early October dates at West Hollywood’s Book Soup and Fullerton’s Programme Skate & Sound). Although it’s a more intimate setting than he’s used to and he’s lacking his signature guitar, Baker jokes that it’s not so different from performing music, because he’s still “on a stage with a microphone and wearing black pants.”

The book tour has also been an opportunity for Baker to connect with fans and reflect on Bad Religion and his prior bands (along with various side projects like supergroup Fake Names and Beach Rats). While he maintains that his involvement in punk history mostly comes down to happenstance, he believes that Bad Religion’s multi-generational staying power stems from always being “uniquely unfashionable” and having intelligent lyrics about topics that are still relevant. Add in the fact that they’re always improving as musicians and just enjoy getting together without looking at the bigger picture, and “not having a plan has proven to be effective” for the stalwarts.

Photo of Baker’s first amp and guitar

(Brian Baker)

But more than anything, Baker’s lack of planning or direction around his photography brings him back to the DIY nature of his early days creating albums that are now viewed as the very foundation of a four-decade-old global hardcore movement.

“Anybody can do this, so it does remind me of making records when I was very young,” Baker says. “We were just making our own records ourselves and selling them in high school, and that was Minor Threat. You think about how significant that is now, 45 years later, it’s the same thing with taking pictures. I just took a bunch of pictures, and now someone’s made a book out of them. It’s something you can do yourself, and I love that about it.”