Apple and the FBI are not getting along so well these days, as regular PYMNTS readers and anyone who has read the news in the last week probably already knows.
The Department of Justice wants Apple to build them a decryption key to unlock the iPhone of the San Bernardino shooters.
Apple thinks building such a key is a paradigmatic case of the cure being worse than the disease — and that the DoJ lacks the legal authority to drop such an order.
So far, a federal magistrate has agreed with the Feds and ordered Apple to build the key the FBI needs, a ruling based in the All Writs Act of 1789.
Apple has vowed to appeal, and has now officially released its counter offer to the DoJ before dragging the privacy/security fistfight all the way through the federal court system.
“We feel the best way forward would be for the government to withdraw its demands under the All Writs Act and, as some in Congress have proposed, form a commission or other panel of experts on intelligence, technology and civil liberties to discuss the implications for law enforcement, national security, privacy and personal freedoms,” he wrote.
“The only way to guarantee that such a powerful tool isn’t abused and doesn’t fall into the wrong hands is to never create it,” he further noted.
Apple concedes that as a matter of technical possibility, Apple can do what the DoJ wants. Not easily, Cook notes, as doing so would require the development of an entirely new OS with undermined security features.
The DoJ, for its part, seems to think that Apple’s reaction is one part histrionics and one part inappropriate power grab on the part of a private firm.
“We don’t want to break anyone’s encryption or set a master key loose on the land,” FBI Director James Comey wrote in a blog post Sunday, adding that privacy issues should not be determined by “corporations that sell stuff for a living.”
But Apple had a response to that.
“Law enforcement agents around the country have already said they have hundreds of iPhones they want Apple to unlock if the FBI wins this case,” the company responded.
And that is not an entirely groundless accusation. In a recent interview, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. was asked if this phone unlock should be what allows them to open a host of other suspect phones.
According to The New York Times, Vance responded: “Absolutely right.”
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