America is trampling on civil liberties, says Apple boss
THE American government is endangering its own citizens and trampling over civil liberties by demanding that Apple unlock the mobile phones used by the San Bernardino terrorists, the company’s chief executive has said, in a hard-hitting defence of Apple’s policy.
Tim Cook, head of the tech company, described his battle with the US government as “a bad dream” and said it was not just his company’s technology that was at stake – but rather the very foundations of American society.
Last month a judge ruled that Apple must help the FBI in accessing the iPhone 5c owned by Syed Farook, who killed 14 people at a health clinic in the California city in December alongside his wife, Tashfeen Malik.
Mr Cook said the company would fight the ruling, arguing it was “a slippery slope” towards open access to the wealth of information stored on phones.
“No one should have a key that turns a billion locks,” said Mr Cook, 55. He said that creating a “back door” into people’s phones would potentially expose a trove of financial, health and personal data. “You know, you can’t have a back door that says, good people only,” he told work that way.
“Think about the things that are on people’s phones. Their kids’ locations are on there. You can see scenarios that are not far-fetched at all where you can take down power grids going through a smart phone.”
He said that he had been shocked to find himself engaged in a battle over privacy. “We’re in this bizarre position where we’re defending the civil liberties of the country against the government. Who would have ever thought this would happen?”
Mr Cook described Apple as being like “the FedEx guy”, simply delivering messages, without the expectation that the messages would be read or stored.
And he accused the FBI of blundering in their investigation, changing the password on Farook’s iCloud, which rendered the data inaccessible. He also said the FBI had picked the San Bernardino case to use against Apple, knowing how emotive an issue it was.
“I think they picked a case to pursue that they felt they had the strongest possibility of winning,” he said.
He argued that the government should be pushing for greater encryption, rather than removing it, and said that forcing American companies suhccas Google, Facebook and Apple to have ways into their systems would result in the technology being exploited by other, unscrupulous governments.
“There’s too much evidence to suggest that that’s bad for national security,” he said. “It means we’re throwing out founding principles on the side of the road.”