All of us should use iPhone passcodes and any of us can forget them, but few of us are New York City mayors being indicted for corruption and claiming to have changed the code to help investigators.
Following news of his indictment in September 2024, more details have emerged of how investigators seized the Apple devices owned by Mayor Adams in November 2023. The full court filing shows that while two of his cellphones were seized then, they did not include his personal iPhone.
“When Adams produced his personal cellphone the next day in response to a subpoena,” says the filing, “it was ‘locked,’ such that the device required a password to open.”
Adams admitted that once he knew about the investigation into his alleged corruption, he chose to change the iPhone passcode. In order to “prevent members of his staff inadvertently or intentionally deleting the contents of his phone,” he changed the code and increased it from a four-digit to a six-digit one.
Anyway, he says he did this passcode change specifically because he “wished to preserve the contents of his phone due to the investigation.” But, wouldn’t you know it, he “had forgotten the password [sic] he had just set.”
The filing solely recounts the sequence of events and Adams’s explanation, it does not include any commentary from the FBI. However, as first noted by Ars Technica, the filing features the account in a section headed “Adams and His Co-Conspirators Attempt to Conceal Their Criminal Conduct.”
It gets worse
In this same section, a woman identified only as an “Adams Staffer,” agreed to speak to the FBI, but then took a bathroom break. While there, the staffer “deleted the encrypted messaging applications she had used to communicate with Adams” during the alleged corruption incidents.
The filing is very light on details, including known which “encrypted messaging applications” were allegedly involved. However, the contents of third-party messaging apps would not be included in iCloud.
Apple will not unlock iPhones and has refused to add backdoors to allow law enforcement access. It will provide authorities with access to data on iCloud, but that data is encrypted and Apple does not have the ability to read it.
What happens next
Those corruption incidents and the federal charges center on bribery, wire fraud, and receiving illegal campaign contributions from foreign nationals. Adams is accused of soliciting and accepting gifts in exchange for political favors, particularly from Turkey.
This is the first ever federal indictment for a sitting New York mayor. Adams denies the charges, and is next due in court over the case on October 2, 2024.
It’s not known which iPhone Adams had, or what version of iOS it was running. While law enforcement has long had the ability to unlock iPhones despite a lack of cooperation by Apple, they have reportedly not been able to hack models using iOS 17.4 or later.
