U.S. Magistrate Sheri Pym ruled that Apple must help the FBI break into the iPhone belonging to one of the killers in the San Bernardino, Calif., massacre. Apple balked and said that privacy is more important than national security.
It’s a longstanding battle over encryption “backdoors” in Silicon Valley in which protecting customer data is a very high priority. The struggle goes all the way back to the time when Edward Snowden disclosed the extent to which technology and phone companies were aiding U.S. federal officials in spying on data being transmitted through their network.
The demand of the FBI and the judge goes beyond that however. The warrant asks for Apple to create a way to access data stored on a phone. Apple cooperated in turning over iCloud information, but that was updated long before the attacks. The FBI wants the more recent data.
Since Snowden’s revelations, Facebook, Apple and Twitter have unilaterally said they will not create backdoors anymore. The reason is because it affects the confidence of people in the privacy of their products.
The backdoor is being requested by the FBI because iPhone users can set a security feature that only allows a certain number of tries to guess the correct passcode to unlock the phone before all the data on the iPhone is deleted, a security measure intended to keep important data out of the wrong hands.
The FBI is looking for more information behind the San Bernardino mass murder and wants Apple to disable the security feature. Apple says that it requires a parallel operating system that would compromise security and open the phone to hackers, spies and the federal government.
Apple’s Tim Cook posted a briefing on the company’s website which said, “We can find no precedent for an American company being forced to expose its customers to a greater risk of attack. For years, cryptologists and national security experts have been warning against weakening encrypting. Doing so would hurt only the well-meaning and law-abiding citizens who relay on companies like Apple to protect their data.”
The court order creates some serious problems for iPhone users if it is implemented. If the U.S. government can make this demand, why can’t the Chinese or Russian governments? Also, the government would have a “master key” that they could use to access other phones. Who says the government would not misuse this power?
For now Apple, Google and other tech companies are starting to produce encryption that even they cannot break in an effort to answer demands for consumer privacy.
The power to spy on citizens is essential to enforcing end-time global worship laws. This battle is being fought in other domains for now. But the outcome will certainly accelerate or decelerate the push toward the final crisis.
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