Cost of the Effort
While we’re thanking the FBI’s computer scientists, engineers, and other professionals for their hard work, we should also be thinking about the cost of all that work.
Public servants, already swamped with important things to do to protect the American people—and toiling through a pandemic, with all the risk and hardship that entails—had to spend all that time just to access evidence we got court-authorized search warrants for months ago. Our engineers and computer scientists working to access these phones were also needed on other, pressing, national security and criminal investigations.
But the delay getting into these devices didn’t just divert our personnel from other important work. It’s also seriously hampered this investigation.
Finally getting our hands on the evidence al-Shamrani tried to keep from us is great. But we really needed it months ago, back in December, when the court issued its warrants.
In the aftermath of the attack, we and our Joint Terrorism Task Force partners worked urgently to collect and analyze evidence. In the weeks immediately following December 6, we conducted over 500 interviews of witnesses, base personnel, and the shooter’s friends, classmates, and associates—among many other efforts. Because the crucial evidence on the killer’s phones was kept from us, we did all that investigating not knowing what we do now: valuable intelligence about what to ask, what to look for. If we had, our round-the-clock, all-hands-on-deck effort would have been a lot more productive.
Now, months after the attack, anyone he spoke to—here or abroad—has had months to concoct and compare stories with co-conspirators, destroy evidence, or disappear. As a result, there’s a lot we just can’t do at this point that we coul ..
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