Tech world steps carefully in Apple’s fight with feds
After a federal court ordered Apple to help unlock an iPhone used by an attacker in a December mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., the company’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, penned a passionate letter warning of far-reaching implications beyond the case.
The response from other technology companies? A mix of carefully calibrated support and crickets.
Late on Wednesday, Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google, said on Twitter that law enforcement demands to hack customer devices and data “could be a troubling precedent.” Not long afterward, Reform Government Surveillance, a coalition formed by Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook, released a broad statement that did not mention the Apple case or Cook’s letter but said technology companies should not be required to put “back doors” — the equivalent of a tech entryway — into their products.
Asked about Apple’s opposition to the court order, representatives of Microsoft, Twitter and Facebook declined to comment. A spokesman for Amazon, which is not in the coalition, also declined to comment.
The range of reactions highlights the complicated set of factors influencing tech companies’ responses to government demands for customer data in the era after revelations by Edward J. Snowden, the former intelligence contractor, of widespread government surveillance. Some companies may be keeping their heads low to avoid becoming targets during the raucous presidential campaign, while others may fear that being too vocal will jeopardize government sales and relationships with law enforcement, privacy experts said.
“The issue is of monumental importance, not only to the government and Apple but to the other technology giants as well,” said Tom Rubin, a former attorney for Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Justice, who is now a law lecturer at Harvard University. “Those companies are undoubtedly following the case intently, praying that it creates a good precedent and breathing a sigh of relief that it’s not them in the spotlight.”
Cook vowed to fight a federal court order that the company help the FBI bypass security measures on the iPhone because he fears complying could seriously weaken privacy pro- tections for Apple’s customers. If the government is successful, lawyers and privacy advocates warn, other tech companies could be approached to provide back doors into their products for law enforcement.
Some Silicon Valley luminaries were more direct in their support of Cook, including Jan Koum, the chief executive of WhatsApp, the mobile messaging app owned by Facebook. In a message posted to Facebook, Koum said he admired Cook’s position on privacy.
“We must not allow this dangerous precedent to be set,” Koum wrote. “Today our freedom and our liberty is at stake.”
But behind the scenes, there was discomfort among some companies that have generally allied themselves with Apple on the topic of government surveillance.
All of the companies involved in Reform Government Surveillance, including Apple, acknowledge that they often comply with law enforcement requests for customer data when under order from a court. Apple’s stance in this case seemed overly antagonistic to some companies in the coalition, according to people privy to conversations on the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
In its statement on Wednesday, Reform Government Surveillance chose its words carefully. The association’s member companies, the statement said, “remain committed to providing law enforcement with the help it needs while protecting the security of their customers and their customers’ information.”
There was also disagreement about Apple’s tactics. Gunter Ollmann, chief security officer at Vectra Networks, an information security company in San Jose, Calif., argued that the government’s demand that Apple help unlock the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone was in line with similar one-time requests and that Apple was creating an unnecessarily high-stakes battle by framing the unlocking as creating a universal back door.
“I’m concerned that since Apple has attempted to deny the FBI request citing use of ‘backdoors,’ should they lose this legal argument, the repercussions could be extensive to the entire security industry,” he said in a blog post.
If Apple had instead framed the issue as more of a techspecific matter, “the prospect of a lost appeal would be greatly limited,” rather than “being included in appeals over anti-terrorism and a specific instance of a horrific crime,” Ollmann added.
Privacy advocates speculated that one reason Apple was willing to stake out a bolder position against what it saw as law enforcement overreach was that it is not as eager for government business as some of its rivals. Amazon has a large deal with the Central Intelligence Agency to help run its cloud computing operations, for example.
Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy advocacy group, said some tech companies “are a little bit uneasy doing things on the law enforcement side that might disrupt their ability to win contracts.”