Trump has seemingly missed the fact that his Samsung phone, which he intends to switch to as part of his Apple boycott, nearly certainly runs Android. “Apple has responded by publicly repudiating that order”, prosecutors wrote in the filing in federal court in Riverside, Calif.
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Comey did acknowledge in his statement that the clash has laid bare a tension between privacy and security. According to Reuters, senior Apple executives said “they felt they were in good company given the other groups and people Trump has criticized in the past”.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has vigorously opposed the FBI’s demand, saying the government is asking the company to “hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers”.
Investigators want to hack into an iPhone belonging to the late Syed Farook, the USA citizen who along with his wife Tashfeen Malik went on the shooting rampage.
And despite Apple’s opposition, victims of the attack are now trying to convince the company to build the software needed to break into the iPhone with the help of this legal brief. A federal judge ordered Apple to help the FBI but the company has said it plans to fight the order.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump urged people to boycott Apple products.
A number of other tech firms, including Twitter, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have expressed their support for Apple’s stance.
The Department of Justice admitted that the password had been changed, but in a note on Friday, said that the backup of any sort would be “insufficient” as it won’t have the same level information as the phone itself.
“I think Tim Cook is totally out of line and I think the government should come down on Tim Cook very, very hard”, Trump said in the interview on Friday. Had the password not been reset, they said, they may have been able to trigger an automatic iCloud backup, which could have yielded additional information from the device without the need for its passcode.
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Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym’s order is based on the 1789 All Writs Act, which lays out broad authority for the courts to help enforcement of the law. “There is no limit into what the government could require Apple to do”. But at the same time, we don’t want to allow terrorists to establish a safe haven in cyberspace, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters. Apple is right to challenge it, but the case has generated masses of speculation and disinformation, which must be pared away from the truth before one understands why.
