YOU PHONE-Y!
NYPD terror big rips Apple over locked-device probe
THE NYPD’S TOP counterterror official hit Apple on Sunday over the tech company’s refusal to help unlock the phone of the San Bernardino shooters.
Deputy Commissioner John Miller said Apple’s warnings that privacy will be jeopardized if the company is forced to create a system to open up the locked phone are overblown.
“The parade of terribles — which is somehow the government will seize everybody’s health records, go through all of their private information and give it away to the world — is absurd,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”
“This case is entirely overstated,” he said, calling the device “a government-owned phone that belonged to two dead people who have no privacy rights, who are at the middle of a terrorist investigation, where the information on that phone could save lives. I don’t know why we’re still talking about this.”
Apple CEO Tim Cook authored a letter to the tech giant’s customers Tuesday decrying the government’s demand that the company create a key to thwart built-in security features.
“The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor,” he wrote.
But Miller said the government’s order is no different than one for any search of a home or business.
“It’s not about what they (Apple) say, which is creating a backdoor. It’s about showing up with a warrant signed by a judge — that’s how we work in a democracy — and going through a front door, which is how we access all other records,” he said on “Up Close” with Bill Ritter.
Apple’s head lawyer, Theodore e Olson, said Sunday the order r would open a “Pandora’s box” ” and force the company’s “engineers and creative talents to destroy the iPhone as it exists.
“There’s no limit to what thee government could require Apple to do if it succeeds this way,” Olson, a former U.S. solicitor gener- al, said on “This Week.”
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. sided with the feds.
“Nobody wants to have government snooping in their phone . . . But when there is proof that someone committed a crime and proof that evidence of that crime is on a phone, I don’t think people using g common sense would say thatt judges shouldn’t be able to gett that information,” he said on Johnn Catsimatidis’ AM 970 radio show. .