A federal judge ordered Apple to hack into the cell phone of Syed Farook, who is accused in the December attack on a holiday party in California which killed 14 people.
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On Tuesday, federal judge Sheri Pym ordered Apple to build the software that would enable the FBI access into Farook’s iPhone. “We oppose this order, which has implications far beyond the legal case at hand”, Cook said in a letter. Although several politicians have slammed Apple’s decision, some major figures in the tech world have stepped up to the plate to support Apple CEO Tim Cook.
Leading to a first-of-its-kind court order in which Apple is being asked to intervene and disable the phone’s autowipe, where everything on a phone is automatically wiped after 10 failed attempts at entering the passcode.
That assistance would involve creating a new version of the iPhone operating system and installing it on the smartphone that was used by the shooter.
The court declared that the company must help unveil the data stored in the phone found in the possession of the San Bernardino terrorist.
Back in 2014, Apple and Google announced they tightened up their software with “full disk” encryption – which means their security was so beefed up, they could no longer unlock their own products!
Apple’s strong reaction to the court order dramatically escalates the battle between the tech industry and the United States government over how much companies should cooperate in the fight against terrorism, Bloomberg noted. It was the property of the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health, which employed Farook, and the authority had agreed to the search of the phone.
“As a technical matter, creating a path through encryption to provide access that the user does not authorize is, by definition, a “backdoor” security vulnerability into the device”.
Apple says it can not unlock data on devices running iOS8 or newer. “We must not allow this unsafe precedent to be set”, he penned.
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“We still have one of those killers’ phones we have not been able to open – and it’s been over two months now, we’re still working on it”, said FBI Director James Comey. He said that is done through encryption, and creating a work around would be problematic.
