“We found out about this filing from the press, and I don’t think that’s the way the railway should be run”, Cook said.
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Meeting the FBI’s demand “could expose people to incredible vulnerabilities” and “also set a bad precedent that I think many people in America would be offended by”, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook told ABC’s “World News Tonight” on Wednesday.
This is not about one phone, this is about the future.
The iPhone in question was used by San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook, who along with his wife went on a shooting rampage in December that killed 14 and wounded 22. Himes said. “Is it the position of the Federal Bureau of Investigation that it has the authority to compel the inclusion of code in a new device?”
“The only way to get information, at least now the only way we know, is to write a piece of software that we view as sort of the software equivalent of cancer”, Cook said. Without Apple’s help, the iPhone in question would erase all of its data after 10 failed passcode entries.
The company is also anxious about that the case setting a precedent for forcing technology companies to write codes for the government.
“Microsoft had to basically weaken its product so they could enter foreign markets”, Shahani says. In the future models of the smartphone, Apple wants to devise a way to disable this mode or restrict it. Jail-breakers know well of the DFU as they use it to bypass some features to install a special version. “Maybe it doesn’t. But we can’t look the survivors in the eye, or ourselves in the mirror, if we don’t follow this lead”.
Cook has become a staunch defender of encryption and the right to digital privacy and last week wrote an open letter claiming that creating software to hack into an individual iPhone was unconstitutional.
“Our smartphones are loaded with our intimate conversations, our financial data, our health records”.
The public needs to debate whether law enforcement should be able to access encrypted communications with a court order, and how to balance that with technological advances created to protect customers’ privacy from hackers and unwarranted government surveillance, he said. “No one would want a master key built that would turn hundreds of millions of locks… that key could be stolen”.
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Updated from 12:26 p.m.to include the fact Apple has filed a motion to vacate court order.
