Barr demands Apple unlock Pensacola gunman Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani’s iPhones

Attorney General William Barr said Monday that a deadly shooting last month at the naval air station in Pensacola, Fla., was an act of terrorism, as he publicly called out Apple to unlock two iPhones used by the gunman.

Barr’s appeal was an escalation of an ongoing fight between the Justice Department and Apple pitting personal privacy against public safety.

“This situation perfectly illustrates why it is critical that the public be able to get access to digital evidence,” Barr said at a news conference, calling on the tech giant and other tech companies to cooperate more and complaining that Apple had provided no “substantive assistance.”

Apple gave investigators materials from the iCloud account of the gunman, Second Lt. Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, a member of the Saudi air force training with the American military, who shot dead three sailors and wounded eight others early last month.

But the company refused to help the FBI open the phones themselves, which would undermine its claims that its phones were secure, the paper reported.

Justice Department officials said that they need access to Alshamrani’s phones to see messages from encrypted apps like Signal or WhatsApp to determine whether he had acted alone or had accomplices at the Florida base.

“The evidence shows that the shooter was motivated by jihadist ideology,” Barr said, citing a message that Mr. Alshamrani posted on 2019’s anniversary of Sept. 11, warning that “the countdown has begun.”

He also visited the 9/11 memorial in New York over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Alshamrani posted anti-American, anti-Israeli and jihadist messages on social media, including just two hours before he attacked the sprawling base, Barr said.

During a 15-minute shooting spree, Alshamrani shot at a photo of President Trump as well as a former president, according to FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich, and witnesses at the scene said he made statements critical of American military actions overseas. Bowdich said that while al-Shamrani did not seem to be inspired by one specific terrorist group, he harbored anti-American and anti-Israel views and felt “violence was necessary.”

Monday’s announcement offered the most definitive account of the gunman’s actions and thinking. Bowdich said investigators had interviewed more than 500 people and collected more than 42 terabytes of digital information.

But investigators have been stymied in trying to access two key pieces of evidence – the gunman’s iPhones. Standing before giant photographs of two severely damaged devices, one of which Alshamrani paused during his rampage to shoot, the attorney general publicly urged Apple to act.

“So far Apple has not given us any substantive assistance,” Barr said, though aides later clarified that Apple had, in fact, given investigators access to cloud data linked to the gunman. “This situation perfectly illustrates why it is critical that investigators be able to get access to digital evidence once they have obtained a court order.”On Sunday, it was reported that more than a dozen Saudi Arabian servicemen training in the US would be expelled from the country in the wake of last month’s shootings.

None of the expelled Saudis are accused of assisting Alshamrani, 21, before he opened fire at Naval Air Station Pensacola on Dec. 6.

But some were believed to have connections to extremist movements and several were accused of being in possession of child pornography, sources told the network.

“In the wake of the Pensacola tragedy, the Department of Defense restricted to classroom training programs foreign military students from Saudi Arabia while we conducted a review and enhancement of our foreign student vetting process,” department spokesman Lt. Col. Robert Carver said.

“That training pause is still in place while we implement new screening and security measures.”

A number of Saudi students at the Pensacola base had been confined to quarters while the FBI investigated the shooting as a terror attack, CNN said.

At the time of the Pensacola shooting, there were about 850 Saudi military personnel training at various locations in the US, part of a total of about 5,000 from 29 NATO nations and other allies.