“We stand with @tim_cook and Apple (and thank him for his leadership)!”
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Apple executives said on Friday that they tried to help law enforcement unlock the phone, including sending engineers to San Bernardino. But it said it will “fight aggressively” against requirements for companies to weaken the security of their systems.
“The implications of the government’s demands are chilling”, he wrote. The case could eventually reach the US Supreme Court. The government has said the couple were sympathizers of Islamic State militants and wants to open the phone to find out more about possible connections and contacts.
In this case, a federal court has ordered Apple to build new software enabling the FBI to quickly guess an infinite number of passwords to access data on the phone of Syed Rizwan Farook. Apple deserves kudos for doing all it can to keep our data safe.
But in recent months, he suggested companies have the technical capability to help the Federal Bureau of Investigation but don’t have a business interest.
Trump has taken his campaign against Apple to social media.
In its motion filed Friday, the DOJ indicated a San Bernardino Health Department worker had changed the Apple ID password, but it offered no more than a mention of this in a single footnote. The company also noted that no other government-which included authoritarian regimes such as China by definition-have asked Apple to do this. Apple sells millions of iPhones in China, which has become the company’s second-largest market. The West Coast culture has a “nerdy, libertarian streak” that was on full display during debates with government officials over encryption, digital copyrights and the National Security Agency’s extensive surveillance operations, says Neil Richards, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
The law, called the All Writs Act, allows federal courts to issue orders that fill the gap in between laws. Apple has refused to comply.
That decision “eliminated the possibility” of retrieving this information through a backup to iCloud, the Justice Department admitted. “And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control”.
Apple’s Cook, however, declared the demand would create what amounts to a “backdoor” in Apple’s encryption software. In their filing Friday, prosecutors explained that investigators would be willing to work remotely to test passcodes, while Apple retained both possession of the phone and the technology itself. Once the information was stored in the cloud, Apple could have recovered it and surrendered it to law enforcement under subpoena, said the executive, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the pending court case.
Apple CEO Tim Cook distanced the company from the suggestion that it was protecting the privacy of an extremist.
“I want to see the day when Apple makes its products on our land”, Trump said to applause. What I think you ought to do is boycott Apple until such a time as they give that security number.
“Compromising the security of our personal information can ultimately put our personal safety at risk”.
If it had been, the high stakes legal battle that has pitted Apple and much of the technology industry against the Us government could have been avoided altogether.
The Republican presidential candidate says people should stop buying their products until they do: “Boycott Apple”.
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Only 40 percent of the Pew respondents said it’s acceptable for the government to monitor US citizens, however.
