(credit: pmquan)

One day after the San Bernardino County district attorney said that an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters might contain a “lying-dormant cyber pathogen,” the county’s top prosecutor went on the offense again. DA Michael Ramos said Apple must assist the FBI in unlocking the phone because an alleged security threat might have been “introduced by its product and concealed by its operating system.”

Ramos’ office said the “Companies that introduce dangerous products, and it can be argued that the iPhone with its current encryption is dangerous to victims, are required to fix them. Companies that create environmental damage are required to clean it up,” the prosecutor said in a filing Friday afternoon.

Ramos, however, has been tight-lipped on exactly what security threat may be on the passcode-protected phone of Syed Farook, a county worker who was one of two shooters in the Dec. 2 massacre that killed 14 and wounded scores of others. The prosecutor suggested in a court filing yesterday that the iPhone—a county phone used by Farook and recovered after the shooting—might be some type of trigger to release a “lying-dormant cyber pathogen” into the county’s computer infrastructure. On Friday, the district attorney again demanded that a federal magistrate presiding over the dispute command Apple to help decrypt the phone.