On Monday, the FBI issued a press statement revealing that it gained access to the password-protected phone of Thomas Matthew Crook, the shooter behind an assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump at the July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
However, breaking into Crook’s phone didn’t come without challenges. According to the New York Times, as of Sunday, the FBI had trouble breaking into his device, prompting the law enforcement agency to send the phone to the bureau’s lab in Quantico, Virginia.
Two days later, the FBI cracked the phone.
What did the FBI find on the cracked phone?
Lab technicians at Quantico sifted through Crook’s texts, emails, and other digital footprints, but according to the New York Times, they “did not immediately find clear evidence of a potential motive.” The FBI’s specialists, the publisher reports, also couldn’t find any new details about the gunman’s “possible connections to other people.”
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However, the investigation is still in the early stages. The FBI isn’t just analyzing his phone, but all of his electronic devices. The law enforcement agency is also looking into Crook’s social media activity and browser history.
It’s unclear which phone Crook had in his possession when the FBI obtained it. Plus, how the Quantico technicians bypassed Crook’s password-protected phone is nebulous, too.
According to The Verge, which cited a security researcher named Cooper Quintin, law enforcement agencies typically use Cellebrite, a mobile device extraction tool, to break into locked phones. Quintin speculated that the field office in Pennsylvania likely didn’t have the advanced phone-cracking tool needed to hack Crook’s device, so they sent it to Quantico.
Again, we don’t know which phone Crook had, but if it was an iPhone, the FBI would have to rely on its own resources to crack the device. As The Verge pointed out, in the past, Apple has pushed back on the FBI’s requests to bypass security protections. In 2015, for example, Apple refused to help the bureau break into the iPhone of the San Bernadino shooter. In the end, the FBI had to enlist the help of an Australian security firm to unlock the shooter’s phone.
Mashable reached out to the law enforcement agency for comment; we will update this article once we get a response.
