WSJ: US Justice Demands Apple’s Help in Accessing Dozen More iPhones
The US Department of Justice is demanding that Apple help in more cases to obtain data from iPhones, the Wall Street Journal claims. This dozen cases do not concern devices related to terrorist attacks.
Like the San Bernardino attacker’s iPhone 5c, the dozen other iPhones are court demands based on the All Writs Act, which dates back to 1789 and allows federal courts to compel companies to do as they ask. Many of the iPhones from the other business run an older iOS version with fewer layers of security. Despite this, justice demands that the court order Apple to help with unlocking to gain access to the data. Details about the cases have not been disclosed by the sources cited by the WSJ, so it is not known whether, for example, the FBI is involved and whether that service can not gain access to the iPhones.
At least that seems to be the case with the attacker’s device. The FBI appears to have ordered the perpetrator’s Apple ID to be reset shortly after the San Bernardino shooting, according to the SF Chronicle. As a result, the contents of the iPhone 5c could no longer be backed up to iCloud and the FBI was faced with the problem that it could only be accessed via the encrypted device itself. Apple was then required to grant that access; that would have to be done via special firmware. According to Apple CEO Tim Cook, this is equivalent to developing a master key.
In the US, the discussion is now going on whether Apple should cooperate or not. Some of the victims of the attack think so, and 51 percent of American participants in a PewResearchCenter survey also say that Apple should unlock the iPhone. They get support from Bill Gates. The former Microsoft CEO agrees with the FBI’s position that it is not a generic key to iPhones. “This is a specific case where the government is asking for access to information,” Gates said in an interview with the Financial Times.
Opposite this camp are privacy advocates and many top people at tech companies. For example, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledges his support to Apple to the WSJ. According to him, an obligation to build in backdoors to bypass encryption is ‘not the right thing’ to do. Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey also sided with Apple. In the Pew survey, 38 percent of participants say Apple should not cooperate; 11 percent had no opinion.
Update, 15.11: Bill Gates claims to Bloomberg that his opinion has not been conveyed well in the media. He would only have meant that he can imagine that there are situations that are so serious that the government must have access to data.