苹果曾协助搜寻MH370失踪客机

苹果公司在美国国会听证会上透露了这一消息。

目前，苹果与FBI之间关于是否解锁凶犯iphone手机的争端如火如荼。在一场原本为此举行的国会听证上，苹果披露了一桩不为人知的轶闻，而且与至今下落不明的马来西亚航空MH370航班有关。

当时，苹果首席法律顾问布鲁斯•休厄尔被问到一个假设性问题：“如果紧急情况下要用到iPhone里的数据，苹果会怎么处理？”

这个问题是由美国众议院议员塞德里克•里士满提出的。科技媒体The Verge最先报道了此事。该问题是，假如有恐怖分子将核弹信息存放在一部iPhone内，而后突然被杀，苹果要花多长时间才能开发出能找出核弹信息的技术？

休厄尔的回答是，过去出现紧急情况时，苹果参与过类似合作，包括两年前搜寻失联的马航飞机时。

“在宣告客机失联后一小时内，苹果公司的操作员就和全球各地的电话服务商合作，配合航空公司与FBI寻找测试数据包的ping命令，找出可能定位飞机位置的方法。”休厄尔在听证会上这么回答。

他说，遇到紧急情况，苹果的第一反应会是启动所有应急程序，立刻寻找可能解决问题的一切信息。

在听证会的回答里，休厄尔可能也暗示了，苹果只会协助现有机构，采用已有技术合作，不会按照FBI的要求开发新的软件。

如休厄尔所说，为了寻找MH370在南印度洋的大致方位，苹果大量运用的办法是分析人造卫星捕捉的ping命令。然而，上周末在莫桑比克海岸发现了一块疑似MH370的残骸，发现的位置和搜救区有些距离。（财富中文网）

译者：Pessy

校对：夏林

The company said during a congressional hearing

In a congressional hearing for Apple and the FBI’s fight over accessing a locked iPhone, an interesting tidbit about the still-missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 came up.

Apple’s AAPL 0.22% general counsel Bruce Sewell was asked about a hypothetical: how would the company handle emergencies that involve accessing data in the phone?

The hypothetical situation put forth by Rep. Cedric Richmond, and first noted by The Verge, was if a terrorist placed information about a nuclear bomb into an iPhone and was suddenly killed. How long would it take Apple to build a piece of technology to find out more about the bomb?

Sewell answered—and you can watch his reply at the5 hour, 1 minute and 40 second-mark here—that Apple has cooperated in previous urgent situations, including in the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight two years ago.

“Within one hour of that plane being declared missing, we had Apple operators cooperating with telephone providers all over the world, with the airlines [and] with the FBI to try to find a ping, to try to find some way that we could locate where that plane was,” Sewell said at the hearing.

He said the first response would be to bring together all the emergency procedures at Apple’s disposal to try and find any information that could address immediate situations.

Sewell might have been implicitly suggesting that the company would work with existing agencies and technology as its way of helping, rather than actually creating new software, which the FBI iscurrently asking the company to do.

It was also the analysis of satellite pings to locate the missing MH370 plane was heavily used in determining the general location of the plane in the southern Indian Ocean. However, a piece of wreckage was found over the weekend on the coast of Mozambique, which is some ways away from the search area.