I wouldn’t be surprised if this was parallel reconstruction. They might have used this approach to mask a honeypot they have or a much simpler tracing scheme because this approach is time consuming and complicated dealing with a warrant to multiple companies in sequence.
It’s super easy actually. You can just send the warrant (via a pdf) to apples security portal. That’s it, they verify and then email back the info encrypted. They then email a decryption key a few days later.
This process is used all the time. Facebook/ Meta has an easy law enforcement portal that does the same thing (same for Snapchat, etc).
If anything they would use parallel construction and setup pretend documentation on old school investigation… they would want to hide that all these crimes are essentially solved via easy to access phone data.
Why would you assume that? It is routine to issue warrants to multiple companies, and issuing a warrant to companies like Apple, Google, or Verizon is nothing like the others. They have entire divisions whose only job is to validate them service LEO requests. Ive heard the cell providers have APIs for them.
I can see this being hard and time consuming the first time around, but I’m sure now it’s just routine.
