Apple preps for legal fight with DOJ over encryption

Apple is preparing for a legal battle with the U.S. Justice Department and the Trump administration as the company publicly attempts to defuse the dispute, The New York Times reports today. Apple CEO Tim Cook has assembled a group of top advisers on the issue as U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr has publicly slammed the company for not helping to penetrate two phones used by an Islamic terrorist in a deadly shooting last month at a Pensacola naval air station.

Jack Nicas and Katie Benner for The New York Times:

Executives at Apple have been surprised by the case’s quick escalation, said people familiar with the company who were not authorized to speak publicly. And there is frustration and skepticism among some on the Apple team working on the issue that the Justice Department hasn’t spent enough time trying to get into the iPhones with third-party tools, said one person with knowledge of the matter…

The stakes are high for Mr. Cook, who has built an unusual alliance with President Trump that has helped Apple largely avoid damaging tariffs in the trade war with China. That relationship will now be tested as Mr. Cook confronts Mr. Barr, one of the president’s closest allies…

Apple has said it chooses not to build a “backdoor” way for governments to get into iPhones and to bypass encryption because that would create a slippery slope that could damage people’s privacy…

Bruce Sewell, Apple’s former general counsel who helped lead the company’s response in the San Bernardino case, said in an interview last year that Mr. Cook had staked his reputation on the stance. Had Apple’s board not agreed with the position, Mr. Cook was prepared to resign, Mr. Sewell said…

Mr. Cook has made privacy one of Apple’s core values. That has set Apple apart from tech giants like Facebook and Google, which have faced scrutiny for vacuuming up people’s data to sell ads.

MacDailyNews Take: The U.S. government is feigning ignorance on this issue in what seems to be an attempt to sway public sentiment against Apple and/or to set up a legal battle to somehow force Apple to create a backdoor that will jeopardize the security and privacy of every iPhone user. Why do we say that the U.S. government is feigning ignorance? Because there are ways to get into older iPhones via third-party forensics companies that the U.S. government has utilized in the past.

“Security researchers and a former senior Apple executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity said tools from at least two companies, Cellebrite and Grayshift, have long been able to bypass the encryption on those iPhone models,” Nicas and Benner report in their full article.

Would The U.S. Supreme Court — because that’s where this is going to end up if the DOJ keeps ratcheting this up — be able to force a company to break their product, making it less desirable at home and abroad? Any criminal can get encryption for communicating amongst themselves on their own — they’ll be secure and all of the rest of us will not.

Wise Americans know and understand the meaning of the following quote:

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. – Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

This is not about this phone. This is about the future. And so I do see it as a precedent that should not be done in this country or in any country. This is about civil liberties and is about people’s abilities to protect themselves. If we take encryption away… the only people that would be affected are the good people, not the bad people. Apple doesn’t own encryption. Encryption is readily available in every country in the world, as a matter of fact, the U.S. government sponsors and funds encryption in many cases. And so, if we limit it in some way, the people that we’ll hurt are the good people, not the bad people; they will find it anyway. — Apple CEO Tim Cook, February 2016