Apple Reveals Efforts to Locate Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH 370

Yesterday, at a special hearing of the House Judiciary Committee in Washington D.C., Apple’s own Bruce Sewell responded to a question about how the Cupertino, California company would typically respond to “situations prompting an immediate or imminent emergency”.

Sewell boasted that the iPhone maker began assisting, almost immediately after the news was first revealed, in the international effort to locate debris belonging to the befallen Malaysia Airlines flight MH 370, which disappeared while flying over the Indian Ocean almost two years ago.

At the hearing, U.S. Rep. Cedric Richmond and Apple’s Bruce Sewell exchanged a series of quips, generally in regards to how the Silicon Valley tech giant would typically respond to emergency situations — such as, for argument sake, if clues relevant to an impending nuclear explosion were locked inside an iPhone.

And Sewell’s response was right on target, too, as he clearly indicated that Apple would, of its own volition, attempt to find “all of the data that surrounds that phone.” He then directed the committee’s attention to a number of other instances in which Apple had cooperated with authorities during previous emergencies — including one involving the search for a lost child, and the company’s aid to the FBI after the Malaysia Airlines plane was first reported missing.

“When the Malaysia Airline’s plane went down, within one hour of that plane being declared missing, we had Apple operators cooperating with telephone providers all over the world, with the airlines in addition to the FBI to try to find a ping, to try to find some way we could locate where that plane was,” Sewell indicated at the hearing.

He further bolstered Apple’s stance on the sensitive matter, indicating that the company would exercise all “emergency procedures” it has available to help during the types on hypothetical situations posed by Rep. Richmond.

During the hearing, Sewell was heavily questioned — at some points, even grilled like a flank steak — in regards to Apple’s seemingly immovable stance on encryption. As of today, however, the tech giant continues steadfast in its fight with the FBI — which has taken the form of a legal dispute over whether or not the company is helping to crack the security on an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters, Saeed Farook, prior to and during the time of the attack.

An Apple Spokesman declined to elaborate on Sewell’s comments from the hearing.

As for the yet-to-be-recovered debris from the befallen airliner, a collective of search teams from Australia, Europe, and several Asian countries have recently reported the discovery of debris belonging to a Boeing 777 aircraft off the coast of Mozambique, Africa. And, accordingly, they’ve begun to investigate whether or not the new find will add a few pieces to the illusive puzzle that is MH 370’s disappearance from thin air — nearly two years after news of the event initially rocked the globe.

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What do you think about Apple’s response to the House Judiciary Committee?