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Weeks of contentious debate weighing privacy rights against the government's need to investigate terrorism came to an end Monday when the FBI said it found a way to gain access to Syed Rizwan Farook's iPhone 5c.
The announcement may have staved off a historic court battle, but questions still linger about how the government gained access to the device and what implications the FBI's tactics will have beyond the investigation into the San Bernardino terror attacks.
How did the FBI get access to the data on Farook's phone?
Federal prosecutors did not offer many specifics. Apple and the Department of Justice were headed for a court battle last week before federal prosecutors made an eleventh-hour request for a delay, announcing that an outside group may have found a technique to hack the device.
The breakthrough came last weekend, according to an anonymous law enforcement official, who would not say how the device was hacked or what information the government found on Farook's iPhone.
Previously, the FBI had been stonewalled by an update Apple made to its encryption practices in September 2014. Farook had enabled an auto-erase feature that would permanently delete all data on the phone after 10 consecutive failed attempts to enter the device's password.
Data on the phone would be scrambled unless a correct password was entered, and Apple has repeatedly said it would need to create technology to defeat that encryption. Farook intentionally disabled the phone's iCloud backup feature six weeks before the Dec. 2 attacks, according to court documents.
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