A company that makes phone hacking devices claims to have developed a solution that freezes iPhones in a state that lets cops more easily access sensitive data inside them, according to a video obtained by 404 Media.

This is the latest salvo in the never-ending battle between Apple and companies that help cops — sometimes those in authoritarian countries — break into iPhones.

In November 2024, 404 Media revealed Apple quietly introduced a new feature in iOS that automatically reboots an iPhone that has not been unlocked for 72 hours. The idea behind this so-called “inactivity reboot” is to revert the phone to a state that makes it harder for police to break into the device, and thus extract sensitive data from it with forensics technology.

At the time of Apple’s change, law enforcement agents expressed concern about this new feature, given that oftentimes they can’t immediately try to break into iPhones that have been seized. That could be because police are still waiting for a court authorization to do so, or there is simply a backlog of devices to unlock, for example.


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[–] 1 point 2 hours ago

I know that the courts are still ruling against Trump and the Republicans fairly regularly, but then I hear about situations where they’re simply ignoring the courts’ rulings and little seems to actually happen as a result.

There has to be a mechanism of enforcement for an order to having meaning. For non-lawyer disobeyers, normally what a judge would do is hold someone in contempt and have federal marshals or sheriffs arrest the person. In this situation, no federal judge is going to request the US Marshals arrest a member of the Trump administration because it would create a constitutional crisis and because the executive legal team would immediately appeal it to his Supreme Court who would overrule them. So a smart judge doesn't want the crisis and knows they will get overruled and won't use federal Marshal arrest power. As a result, there is no mechanism for non-lawyers. A lawyer like Janine Pirro may have to deal with an ethics complaint, but most of the people in the executive branch doing arguably illegal things aren't lawyers. So then what? There's no solution to this, it's uncharted territory and a complete disaster.

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