Apple’s Side Of The FBI Stand-off

The Apple-FBI standoff is not about All Writs Act or one phone. Behind this one argument is the future of user privacy.

On March 17th, Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, gave Time magazine an exclusive interview regarding the FBI stand-off, discussing an average man’s privacy, America’s security policies and what’s at stake with the encryption key battle.

For the rest of the article, I am going to refer to his Time magazine interview, appropriately quoting from therein.

Before we proceed with this, let us quickly get a recap done , of the entire Apple vs. FBI battle so you’re on the right page.

In the first half of February this year, FBI requested Apple to help unlock an iPhone 5C that belonged to the San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan. Apple refused to adhere to this request on various grounds, the chief of these being that of “user privacy”.
Given such blatant denial of assistance, FBI triggered the escalation channel — a U.S. Court, and the two organisations have been involved in court battles ever since.

Narrating the receipt of the FBI request, Cook said: “We have a desk, if you will, set up to take requests from the government. It’s set up 24/7 — not as a result of this, it’s been going for a while — and the call came into that desk, and they presented us with a warrant as it relates to this specific phone.”

Contrary to public belief, the company did help the American Federal agency, until matters got to a critical juncture — where Apple believed that user privacy was being threatened and could impact more than just this one case.

“We gave them some unsolicited advice — we said, take the phone to the home or apartment and power it, plug it in and let it back up. And as it turned out, they came back and said, Well, that didn’t work.”account on the phone,

The agency had also decided to change the password of the iCloud which made it impossible for the phone to back up to the cloud, which it otherwise would have done automatically.

Boxed in by the security features of iOS, but really caused by their own ineptitude (this is Chip-Monks saying it, not Apple or Time), FBI then ‘asked’ Apple if they could code up a special version of iOS 9, that would bypass the “self-destruct” security functionality, so that they’d be able to break into the phone by “brute-forcing” the device by running hundreds of millions of password combinations till they stumbled upon the correct one.
All recent versions of iOS allow a maximum of 10 failed passcode attempts before locking the “intruder” out of the phone.

This is where the company put its foot down, refusing to assist the federal agency in its errands anymore.

Regarding the decision to not help FBI, Cook said: “Lots of people were involved. It wasn’t just me sitting in a room somewhere deciding that way, it was a labored decision. We thought about all the things you would think we would think about.”
The decision, when it came, was a firm “no.”

FBI then sued Apple, and decidedly did not under “the seal” (i.e. away from public-disclosures, which it is allowed to do in sensitive matters) as it easily could have. This morals-vs.-ego issue thus became a deliberately public spectacle.

Ever since, this matter has been drawing the public attention in a way that no other case in the past has. After all, it is the people’s beloved Apple, one of the biggest smartphone companies in the world, that is involved. To top that, Apple has a reputation for taking its user privacy very seriously.

Support has been flowing in from all directions: AT&T, Airbnb, eBay, Kickstarter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Square, Twitter, Cisco, Snapchat, WhatsApp. Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft.

And it’s not just the big tech companies that are backing Apple on this, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, along with retired General Michael Hayden, former head of both the NSA and the CIA spoke in support of the company.

Let’s just say, the debate around the world has been heated, with the support for Apple has been overwhelming.

“It’s not that one side has life and one side is your financial information or your photo or whatever” he said, talking about the entire idea of user privacy and security. “Think about something that happens to the infrastructure, where there’s a power-grid issue. Think about the people who are on a medical device that depends on electricity … these aren’t fantasy things by any means.”

The Apple-FBI standoff, in short, is not about All Writs Act or one phone. Behind this one argument is the future of user privacy.

What Tim Cook in saying (reference his interview with the Time magazine) is that today it is one phone, but tomorrow it will be a hundred, and then more, and then every phone.
He is circumspect of where that buck will stop, if at all; and he is not alone in that fear.

While the debate is obviously multi-sided, and FBI is firm and perhaps correct on its stand (for this specific matter), what’s to see now, is which way the argument goes and what happens in Court.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.