WASHINGTON — A furious legal battle over digital privacy in the age of the iPhone ended on Monday with no clear winner — only lingering questions over what will happen the next time the government tries to force Apple to help break into one of its own phones.  The Justice Department announced Monday that it had gotten what it wanted most immediately in the case of the San Bernardino, California, terrorist attack: a way to unlock the iPhone used by one of the shooters to determine what evidence it might hold, even without Apple’s assistance.  But that development forestalls a court ruling on the bigger legal questions that have been so hotly debated since the case erupted last month when a judge in California ordered Apple to unlock the phone used by Syed Rizwan Farook.  The legal debate in that state offered what many legal analysts saw as a powerful test case for the Justice Department to establish its position. But that verdict will now have to wait for another day.  “This might be a missed opportunity for the Justice Department,” said Eric Berg, a former federal prosecutor who now works on electronic surveillance cases at a private practice in Milwaukee. “Having this whole debate muted by this solution is probably a little bit disappointing for them.”  The effort raises new uncertainties, including questions about the strength of security in Apple devices.  Likewise, the development represented an uneven result for privacy advocates. They could claim some measure of victory because Apple was able to hold to its position without giving in to the government, but an apparent flaw in Apple’s vaunted encryption protocols was worrisome.  “Unfortunately, this news appears to be just a delay of an inevitable fight over whether the FBI can force Apple to undermine the security of its own products,” said Alex Abdo, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union.  The Justice Department did not say whether it would seek to use the method discovered for accessing the San Bernardino phone in any other cases. Law enforcement officials have said they have been locked out of dozens of other phones as a result of encryption safeguards, and the unlocking method — a tightly held secret at the FBI — could be valuable in many of those cases as well. But some law enforcement officials said it was too early to say anything about their ability to access other phones.  With the Justice Department moving on Monday to withdraw its motion forcing Apple’s cooperation in the San Bernardino case, Apple is still on the winning side in a separate but related case in federal court in Brooklyn.  In that case, U.S. Magistrate Judge James Orenstein in the eastern district of New York ruled last month in a 50-page opinion that the Justice Department was not entitled to force Apple’s cooperation in unlocking a drug dealer’s iPhone. He said that prosecutors were taking too broad a ruling of a 1789 statute known as the All Writs Act in seeking to secure Apple’s cooperation.  The Justice Department is appealing his decision.  Berg, the Milwaukee lawyer, said that although the San Bernardino fight might have ended without a court decision and a clear verdict, “this case has forced a national dialogue, and it really has brought this issue front and center. So the public won in the sense that this issue is now being debated.”
The government says it was able to break into an iPhone in a terrorism case. But what about the next time it needs help hacking into a device?