Since earlier this month, Apple has been receiving high praise for what many people see as a heroic stand for individual privacy rights.
In an open letter to the FBI, CEO Tim Cook said that Apple would not be complying with a court order to unlock an iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the San Bernardino attackers. The letter claims that to unlock Farook’s phone, Apple would have to create a security “backdoor”, which could then be exploited by hackers and other cybercriminals in the future. In the letter, Cook calls the court order, “an unprecedented step which threatens the security of our customers.”
This is Apple’s main justification for refusing the order — and the image of Apple as a crusader for privacy has definitely played well in the media. But there’s one small bit of information that Cook conveniently left out of his open letter: the fact that Apple has unlocked iPhones for the FBI on more than 70 different occasions since 2008.
This bit of information came to light last year, during a similar Apple vs. the FBI case in New York. In that case, Apple admitted that it could bypass the iPhone’s passcode feature, as long as the phone was in good condition. The company’s lawyers argued, however, that, “forcing Apple to extract data… absent clear legal authority to do so, could threaten the trust between Apple and its customers and substantially tarnish the Apple brand.” In other words: we can do it, but it would make us look really bad to our customers.
Apple CEO Tim Cook discusses his company’s stand against the FBI in an interview with ABC’s David Muir (Courtesy of ABC)
The phone in the New York case was running an older version of the iPhone operating system, but some experts say that Apple could crack Farook’s phone in much the same way.
The court documents from the New York case also cast doubts on some of the claims being made by the FBI. During a hearing in October, Judge James Orenstein said that he’d been made aware of testimony in another case that revealed that the Department of Homeland Security, “is in possession of technology that would allow its forensic technicians to override the pass codes security feature on the subject iPhone and obtain the data contained therein.”
The government’s lawyers claimed that the DHS’s hacking software only worked on one specific update of IOS (8.1.2), but the revelation led Judge Orenstein to question whether other government agencies had already created new iPhone-cracking technologies — ones that simply hadn’t been revealed to the public yet.
“[There is] the possibility that on the intel side, the government has this capability. I would be surprised if you would say it in open court one way or the other,” Orenstein said during the October hearing.
With all of the conflicting claims coming from both Apple and the FBI right now, making sense of this privacy battle is no easy task. One thing is certain though: the fight between Apple and the FBI is long from over.
Read more from The Daily Beast and NPR.