Apple showdown over encryption two decades in the making
Apple’s headline-grabbing showdown with Uncle Sam over encryption has been brewing for about two decades.
As cellphones and other gadgets have become common, companies like Apple, Google and Verizon have boosted security measures.
In turn, law enforcement agencies — from local police departments to the FBI — have pushed back, asking for access to data and other information.
Usually, the battles are over requests for data stored on companies’ computers or in the cloud.
But the current case — involving one of the San Bernardino shooters and his iPhone 5C — is different.
The FBI got a federal judge to order Apple to develop a unique operating system — a master key, as some have called it — that would disable an encryption interface on the phone to allow agents an unlimited number of attempts to hack into the device to find out who the shooter, Syed Rizwan Farook, communicated with prior to the attack.
Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said the company would not comply with the court order. He called it an example of government “overreach.”
“The government suggests this tool could only be used once, on one phone,” Cook wrote on his blog Tuesday night. “But that’s simply not true. Once created, the technique could be used over and over again, on any number of devices.”
The government claims the order is for just one phone. But Apple is currently battling Brooklyn federal prosecutors over the same issue — albeit in a much less sexy case.
The case involves a drug dealer — but prosecutors invoked the same All Writs Act from 1789 that is being used in the San Bernardino case.
On Feb. 12, a lawyer for Apple sent a letter to the Brooklyn judge asking him to settle the issue.
Ironically, four days later the issue popped up again, 3,000 miles away.
This latest battle in the so-called “crypto wars” has its roots in 1993, when President Clinton proposed that every new telephone contain a “Clipper Chip” devised by the National Security Agency.
These factory-installed chips were to include cryptographic keys that allowed government agencies to listen in on conversations.
The then-newly formed Electronic Frontier Foundation rallied against the NSA initiative and won.
Other attempts to force tech companies followed, including those after the leak by Edward Snowden in 2013.
Apple claims that if it creates a “master key,” encryption on everything from iPhones to Apple Pay, where bank account info is stored, can be hacked “by anyone with that knowledge.”
Some security experts predict Apple has a good chance to win its legal battle.
Many have come out on the side of the FBI. Much is at stake.
Every day in the White House, President Obama gets his national security briefing delivered to him on an iPad.
That’s something nobody would want hacked.