The Justice Department and FBI said Monday that data from the cellphones of a Saudi Air Force student who opened fire last year at a U.S. military base in Pensacola, Florida, led back to the terror group al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, leading to a counterterrorism operation against one of the gunman’s associates in Yemen.
In addressing the latest developments in the terrorism case, Attorney General William Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray both sharply criticized Apple – the maker of the dead gunman’s phones – for not helping them unlock the devices.
“Apple’s decision has dangerous consequences for public safety and the national security,” said Barr, who said the company’s refusal to change its encryption software meant FBI agents spent four months getting into the gunman’s phones.
“We received effectively no help from Apple,” said Wray, who said the time it took FBI agents to crack into the phones on their own “seriously hampered this investigation.” While the FBI did eventually get critical evidence, he added, “we really needed it months ago.”
An Apple spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The officials’ remarks marked a significant escalation in the on-and-off battle between the Justice Department and Silicon Valley over the issue of encrypted phones. The debate has been at something of a stalemate since 2016, when the Justice Department abandoned a court case that might have settled the issue. That case also involved a dead terrorist’s phone which the FBI first said it could not access, then later said it had.
Barr accused Apple of “facilitating censorship and oppression” by Russia and China, while at the same time frustrating U.S. law enforcement efforts to pursue terrorists, child molesters, and other criminals.
Officials declined to offer any more details about the counterterror operation, other than to say it targeted Abullah al-Maliki, whom they had connected to the Pensacola gunman through the phone data.
“The al-Maliki group has been seriously degraded and I’m very pleased with the results,” the attorney general said.
Authorities have previously said the gunman, Ahmed Mohammed al-Shamrani, a Royal Saudi Air Force member who was training at Naval Air Station Pensacola, was motivated by “jihadist ideology,” including a prominent al-Qaida figure, and had posted anti-American messages on social media about two hours before his attack.
New evidence taken from the suspect’s phone indicates his path toward jihadist radicalization began around 2015, predating his arrival in the United States.
FBI officials said that during the attack, Shamrani fired shots at pictures of President Donald Trump and a past U.S. president, and witnesses at the scene said he made statements critical of American military actions overseas.
A senior FBI official said in January that while Shamrani did not seem to be inspired by one specific terrorist group, he harbored anti-American and anti-Israeli views and felt “violence was necessary.” His social media comments, the FBI said, echoed those of Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Yemeni American cleric with an al-Qaida offshoot who was killed in a drone strike in 2011.Shamrani was part of a contingent of Saudi air force personnel training at U.S. military bases. After the attack, investigators found evidence that 17 fellow students had shared jihadist or anti-American material on social media. As a result, 21 cadets from Saudi Arabia were disenrolled from the training program and sent home.
(c) 2020, The Washington Post · Devlin Barrett
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The first foreign controlled terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11!