WASHINGTON – In what is being hailed by many as a stroke of brilliance, the FBI this week managed to unlock the phone formerly belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters by leaving it unguarded at the table of the popular girls at a local public high school.

One of the agents got the idea when he witnessed his fourteen-year-old daughter hack into a rival peer’s Facebook account “just to mess with her,” sources say. After gaining approval from their supervisor, the agents left the phone unaccompanied on what an apparent dork informed them was “the cool table.”

“We really weren’t sure what results this would bring about,” said lead investigator John Gibbons. “It was more of an experiment than anything else. But you know, the executives at Apple wouldn’t help us and really, we had nothing to lose at that point.”

Gibbons then went undercover as a janitor with a broom and stood within earshot of the table, reporting back to a van parked in the school parking lot through a microphone hidden in a fake beard.

“Basically, I just watched out of my peripheral vision in amazement while those girls unlocked the phone,” Gibbons said. “I wasn’t sure they were going to do it at first. They kept making fun of the phone case. That went on for a good ten minutes. Something about it being ‘ratchet’ and from ‘that kiosk in the shitty mall,’ etcetera, etcetera. Then, one of them started messing with it. I couldn’t see what she was typing, but next thing I knew, bam. They had it open and were messing with a bunch of the apps. I couldn’t believe it.”

The agents waited for the lunch period to end and then confiscated the phone after overhearing the alpha girl say she was going to sell it on eBay. Once they had the unlocked phone back in FBI custody, they were able to go into the accounts kept on it and access the terrorists’ information.

The only remaining obstacle was knowing which accounts and apps the popular girls had managed to tamper with during the forty-minute lunch period. After deleting pictures uploaded to Instagram of several of the girls making obscene gestures, tweets referring to the size of the account holder’s genitals, and canceling a mass order of glow-in-the-dark butt plugs made on the Amazon app, the FBI has said it will use the gathered information to further infiltrate the underground terrorist community. Only information that is not considered a security breach will be shared with the public.

In related news, the FBI has released a statement this week asking the public to disregard an unexplained status update on the shooters’ Facebook page claiming to have become gay and to have had “tons of dix up his ass at Josh B’s house last weekend.”