this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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FBI Couldn’t Get into WaPo Reporter’s iPhone Because It Had Lockdown Mode Enabled (www.404media.co)
submitted 16 hours ago by tonytins@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
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The FBI has been unable to access a Washington Post reporter’s seized iPhone because it was in Lockdown Mode, a sometimes overlooked feature that makes iPhones broadly more secure, according to recently filed court records.

The court record shows what devices and data the FBI was able to ultimately access, and which devices it could not, after raiding the home of the reporter, Hannah Natanson, in January as part of an investigation into leaks of classified information. It also provides rare insight into the apparent effectiveness of Lockdown Mode, or at least how effective it might be before the FBI may try other techniques to access the device.

“Because the iPhone was in Lockdown mode, CART could not extract that device,” the court record reads, referring to the FBI’s Computer Analysis Response Team, a unit focused on performing forensic analyses of seized devices. The document is written by the government, and is opposing the return of Natanson’s devices.

Archive: http://archive.today/gfTg9

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[–] DelightfullyDivisive@discuss.online 7 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (2 children)

I'm an experienced technologist (a software engineer for over 30 years), I used to regularly install CyanogenMod on my phones. While I didn't find the graphene OS installation to be particularly difficult, I did find actually using it to be too much of a challenge to live with every day. The biggest single problem I can recall is that I could not do any group ~~SMS~~ MMS texts. Many searches and attempts at fixes later, I realized that it was a known bug that for reasons unknown did not seem to affect all users. There were a number of minor annoyances in addition to that bug.

That may reflect more on how Google has locked down things on the pixel phones, or other stuff they've done to keep things as proprietary as possible in their software and devices. I switched back because it wasn't worth the hassle to me.

[–] ozymandias117@lemmy.world 2 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

You can't send group texts over SMS

I'd guess the group chat is stuck sending messages to RCS (basically Google Proprietary) rather than MMS

This is the same problem iPhone users have dealt with for a long time when switching to Android and their number is stuck in Apple's iMessage system

[–] DelightfullyDivisive@discuss.online 3 points 14 hours ago

Corrected to MMS.

[–] ToTheGraveMyLove@sh.itjust.works 1 points 13 hours ago

That's odd, group texts works fine on my phone.