FBI’s James Comey had an embarrassing day against Apple

It was a bad day on Capitol Hill for FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday.

First, Comey was forced to admit that his agency’s effort to get Apple to create new software to allow the government to more easily break into a terrorist’s iPhone will likely not be a one-off.

There will likely be other requests from the government to have Apple unlock other iPhones, he said.

Then Comey admitted that the FBI made a mistake in the early days of its handling of the iPhone 5c belonging to San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook by resetting the cloud storage setting connected to the phone.

That mistake likely made it harder for agents to break into the phone to see if there were clues locked on any future terror attacks.

It was an embarrassing moment for Comey.

The FBI has provoked a raging court battle — as well as a national debate on technology versus law enforcement — with its request that Apple disable passcode-protection features that are keeping FBI agents from trying to unlock the iPhone.

Comey argued that Apple is “highly professional” when it comes to security, and that the feds would allow Apple to keep the hacked iPhone safe at its Cupertino, Calif., headquarters once it was unlocked and examined.

The FBI has told Apple officials, “You keep it, you figure it out how to store it — you even take the phone and protect it,” Comey testified.

Later in the afternoon, however, Apple in-house lawyer Bruce Sewell testified that the FBI had asked the tech giant to create a software “tool” to unlock the phone.

“The request we got from the government in this case is, ‘Take this tool and put it on a hard drive, send it to the FBI,’ and they’d load it onto their computer,” Sewell told the panel.

Sewell likewise contradicted Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, who said that, for an iPhone to be put at risk by the hacking tool that law enforcement has requested, “you need the phone physically at Cupertino.”

Cybersecurity expert Susan Landau blasted that approach, testifying that the FBI should be beefing up its cybersecurity resources rather than asking companies like Apple to weaken theirs.

She noted that official access to corporate and government infrastructure is increasingly happening through smartphones.

“Whether you’re talking about the power grid, the water supply, whatever, we’re connected in disastrously insecure ways and the best way to get in is log-in credentials,” Landau said.