The issue of botched data recovery isn’t just because of the fact that a San Bernardino County employee
made recovery of Farook’s iPhone data impossible, but also because Farook’s employer (San Bernardino County again)
neglected to enroll its phones in a device management program. This (simple and available) program would have had to include all County owned phones like Farook’s work phone, as well as any other 3rd party phone accessing data belonging to or under the access care of SBC, and would have made data recovery a cinch. ‘Big’ Brother Bernardino dropped the ball twice here.
Because of these two rather serious errors, the onus for recovery was dumped in Apple’s lap as sort of a third strike. The fact that this work phone (unlike the destroyed personal phone) is unlikely to contain any useful data for the FBI’s investigation won’t help that agency’s case, but doesn’t make much of a difference for Apple’s position either.
