"SO WHAT!!" You exclaim. Who cares? Screw Apple, they should do the patriotic thing and help the Government catch those terrorist dogs before more Americans are hurt or killed!
Whoa there skippy! Calm down. Put down that pitchfork and put out that torch before you hurt yourself. Let me explain why I and a lot of others who understand this situation are behind Apple defying this court order...100%.
1.) The federal government is asking for something that does not exist. While they are saying that it is only this one time, if Apple were to comply and spend the millions of dollars developing this backdoor, the precedent would be set and more and more cases would be based on this. There are already discussions about how strong of encryption/security civilians should be allowed to have. That should scare any sane person out of their minds. Additionally, there are reports of as many as 13 other iPhones that the FBI want included on this court order. So much for just this one time, just this one phone. As I said above...the Genie will be out of the bottle and won't go back
2.) Apple has built a reputation of having extremely secure products, building this custom version of iOS would destroy that reputation while putting the security of every single iPhone owner at risk of having their information stolen because the details of this iOS version will be leaked, people can be bought. Having this tool available is dangerous, plain and simple. When its details were to get out, regardless of how, someone will find a way to reverse engineer it so that it can be remotely installed on the iPhone of unsuspecting people. Information will be stolen. Hackers are crafty suckers. If something exists, they will find a way to get it, or break into it.
3.) This brings up my 3rd point, the reason the government cannot break this phone is because of the hackers they employ. They don't employ people who have the creative genius necessary to do this sort of work. The Mozarts, and Bachs of our day. The people who can see systems in ways that you can I could never learn. The government won't hire these people. Why? Because they won't hire people with 2' tall mohawks, tattoos, heavy gauge piercings, who demand a salary of over $500,000/yr. There are people who do hire them. One of them is named Tim McAfee. He has said that he his team can break that phone within 3 weeks time and they will do it for free. Tim hires the right people to do that because he has built an international company around security. A company that is trusted, and has earned that trust through years of keeping peoples data safe. Its what they do.
4.) Despite what is being reported, Apple has been cooperating with the FBI. They have spent a large amount of money advising the FBI and offering specifications and other details in their attempt to help the FBI to break this phone. They said that if there was a way to get the phone to back itself up to the iCloud that they would decrypt and turn the data over to the FBI from that backup. The problem with that idea comes from a low level county employee who changed the iTunes password that was associated with that phone. That single act prevents that phone from performing a backup to the iCloud. Where Apple is having an issue is the order to create that which doesn't exist. A specialized, and compromised, version of iOS.
Yes, Apple has broken into iPhones in the past. Those iPhones were running older, not nearly as secure versions of iOS. Those phones lack the hardware, and software protective measures that the newer iPhones, such as my iPhone 6s has. These are complex systems that where software and hardware work together to protect the data that is stored on the data.
Look at it this way. Would you want the manufacturers of the government computer systems to leave back doors that they could use to get into the systems, you know just in case.
The long and the short of it is, Apple did a damn fine job making sure that phone is not able to be broken. They did a damn fine job making a product that is secure, and now they are being told that they have to compromise that security by creating a compromised version of iOS. That compromised version will find its way into the wild into the hands of nefarious people. That compromised version will be abused by our government.
Yes I am all for catching terrorists. But I will not sacrifice liberty (mine or another's) in order to do it. Those that would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.
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