So... what I'm gathering from this enlightening conversation is this.
 
If you have an iPhone and go out one night and meet a girl....and save her phone number into the phone...and then proceed to get knee crawling drunk... then decide to call her up the next day, but you're still pretty schloshed from the night before.... and you try several times to unlock the phone to retrieve the number... but being inebriated, you blow the attempts... then lose count as one might do, and try again several times... at the magic 10th try... you will brick wall the phone and everything gets deleted and no one on the planet can help you? 
 
Sounds like a diabolical plan to sell more iPhones.
 
 
All joking aside.... keep the govt out of our affairs as much as possible.... enforce some other laws that are currently on the books but being ignored and we would have less of this kind of chicanery (terror attacks and crime) in the first place.

FakeItTillUmakeIt

bitflipper
... Apple designed it so that after 10 failed attempts everything on the phone gets automatically deleted. A good design, IMO...

So, the data gets deleted. Then, they can do a forensic recovery for which technology they DO have available. I'm just saying.

Depends on how they delete it though. If it's just a garden variety delete where the data is still there but nothing points to it, easy to recover that. However if it's a "hard" delete with one of those fancy schmancy Department of Defense erasing algorithms which write garbage over the top of your data with multiple passes (or even just zeros) then you have no chance of getting it back.

I don't know, but my guess would be that the 4 digit passcode that unlocks the phone allows the OS to access an encryption key specific to the phone itself stored in NVRAM somewhere, and what actually gets deleted is just this key.
 
And if there's a backup of the data outside of the phone (in the cloud or on your computer), it would encrypted separately and associated with your Apple account, not the phone.

Why hack the phone?


All they need do is hack the guys hand (off) and touch a finger on the home button.....    unlocked..

Karyn
Why hack the phone?

"They" prolly figger this is a good time establish a precedent for future reference

I am not a fan of Apple but they do need to make a stand on this issue.
 
I find it hard to believe that someone in the FBI or NSA or CIA or some other nefarious acronym can't pull the storage media out and simply read the encrypted data. Then the gov't can try as long as they want to try to break the encryption. Likewise, I wouldn't have a problem with apple giving the FBI the encrypted files. Why the acronym or trump expects Apple to have some magic bullet to break encryption is confusing to me.

How I hack iPhones.

DrLumen
I find it hard to believe that someone in the FBI or NSA or CIA or some other nefarious acronym can't pull the storage media out and simply read the encrypted data. Then the gov't can try as long as they want to try to break the encryption. Likewise, I wouldn't have a problem with apple giving the FBI the encrypted files. Why the acronym or trump expects Apple to have some magic bullet to break encryption is confusing to me.

I was thinking about this, and my guess is:
 
1. The FBI, whose jurisdiction it is, lacks the capability to either do what it is asking Apple to do or to throw the massive computing power at it required to break the encryption.
 
2. The CIA and/or other groups can surely hack it easily. They are likely sitting there mocking the FBI as we speak, much as McAfee did in the link posted earlier. And so are the Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis and probably lots of other people. 
 
3. The FBI simply doesn't think there's anything of enough value on the (employer issued) phone to warrant getting the CIA or other national security agencies to help. They already must have all the phone records and whatnot, and how dumb can a would-be terrorist be to use a employer issued phone for nefarious activities?
 
So it's just a fishing expedition to see if anything of value happens to turn up somehow, and the easiest way was to just ask Apple for help. Apple and other companies have assisted with getting (more readily available) data in the past, so they might not have anticipated that Apple would say no - especially given the circumstances of the case.

Karyn
Why hack the phone?


All they need do is hack the guys hand (off) and touch a finger on the home button.....    unlocked..

Nope, doesn't work like that. Not outside TV and movies anyway.

The fingerprint readers (not just on iphones but pretty much every modern reader) use at least three things. One is the whorl pattern of the fingerprint. No problem dead or alive.

But they also use a touch-screen style capacitive detector that picks up electrical charge on contact with skin. Doesn't work if finger is dead or the charge is wrong for skin contact. Can perhaps be fooled by a tablet stylus, but tablet styluses don't have fingerprints.

And even if they did, the detectors also look at the pattern of small blood vessels just under the skin. Which doesn't work unless blood is actually flowing and the finger is alive.

Iris and retina recognition systems are similar in that it only works if presented with a living, working eye which is in good order and hasn't been damaged by removal (sorry, gruesome thought...).

Why confuse the issue with facts?