Apple should have agreed to crack specific iPhones

When the FBI in the U.S. went to court last month to force Apple Inc. to help it break into the iPhone of San Bernardino, Calif., terrorist Syed Farook, it touched off an important debate: Is it possible to have both safety and privacy?

The American founding father Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

That pretty much sums up my opinion. If hacking into terrorists’ phones opens all of us up to hacking by criminals or surveillance by the government, then even if it saves lives, the vulnerability of our privacy and personal data just isn’t worth it.

Surely, though, there must be a third way, I thought? Couldn’t Apple agree to develop software — a so-called “backdoor” — that would enable it to get into any phone yet retain complete control over that software?

Then when a judge issued a warrant or court order instructing Apple to open a specific phone for law enforcement, Apple could take that phone and open it for police or intelligence agencies.

I wouldn’t care if Apple took the phone to a secret underground facility under layers of concrete impenetrable to outside scanners, into a secure room with no connection to the Internet or wires to the outside world. That way, no one else would be able to figure out Apple’s hack and reproduce it to steal information from users’ phones.

Were the courts proposing that Apple be forced to create a way into their phones that law enforcement could use willy-nilly to spy on us, I’d be opposed.

My whole life is on my phone and many of your lives are, no doubt, on your phones, too. Financial records, private communications, passwords, banking transactions, photos. Unless we give police probable cause to suspect us of law-breaking, nothing that is on our phones is the government’s business.

Apple was right to worry about safeguarding its customers’ privacy. But so, too, were the FBI correct that Farook was a known terrorist, so there was a genuine reason — public safety — to get into his phone.

It might contain leads to other terrorists operations or other info that could save lives.

When I bounced my third-way idea off a few people, I was surprised by the response I got from a former senior Canadian security officer who said matter-of-factly, “I don’t know why the FBI doesn’t just get the Israelis to hack it. Everybody suspects they’ve known how to bypass the security on smartphones for years.”

Israel is in a very dangerous neighbourhood. Everyone around wants to wipe Israel off the map, literally. And all the bad guys favour encrypted smartphones.

So, my friend explained, “It makes sense the Israelis would know how to open up iPhones and find out what’s on them.”

And sure enough, that appears to be exactly what has happened.

An Israeli company told the FBI it was confident it could crack Farook’s phone. Apparently, it has. It is presumed the company is Cellebrite, a “mobile-forensics and data-extraction” company with a history of connections to the Israeli intelligence service and headquartered in the Israeli desert town of Petah Tikva.

If it is Cellebrite, good for them. Farook deserved no privacy protection after he and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, killed 14 innocent people and wounded 24 more in the name of Allah in San Bernardino in December.

The trouble is, our cellphones probably are now more vulnerable than if Apple had done the right thing from the start.

“Apple was right to worry about safeguarding its customers’ privacy. But so, too, were the FBI correct that Syed Farook was a known terrorist, so there was a genuine reason — public safety — to get into his phone.”

Lorne Gunter is a Postmedia columnist based in Edmonton.