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Tuesday 8 March 2016

Sunday 28 February 2016

APPLE OFFICIALLY RESPONDS TO iPHONE DECRYPTION ORDER

After much back and forth between Apple, the FBI, and other government bodies, the California tech company has filed its official, mandatory response to the state court order compelling it to aid the FBI in cracking into the iPhone of San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook.

Apple's first public resistance to the order came earlier this week, followed by Tim Cook's insistence that Apple would take the issue all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary.

The central dispute is that while the FBI (and the White House) insists that the FBI only needs Apple to help them get access to information on this one phone, Apple insists that the creation of such a workaround would result in the creation of dangerous software that cannot be unnmade, and therefore is equivalent to the more traditional definition of a "backdoor." The official response addresses this dispute as well as calling into question the validity of the use of the All Writs Act in this case, the 277-year-old law that's doing all the heavy legal lifting.

Officials from other tech companies including Facebook, Google, and Verizon have all supported Apple's stance. Higher courts will ultimately decide who is right in the matter, but rumor suggests it may be a moot point in the future; Apple is already hard at work on building phones that even it cannot hack.