Apple Should Not Make A Backdoor For FBI
Imagine that you are a gun manufacturer and the government comes to you with a simple request: make a gun that explodes if the user yells "Allahu Akbar" during Jihad and thus kills the Muslim extremist before he can slaughter innocent lives. Now there are very few people in the world who oppose Islam as strongly as I do, yet I would be vehemently against such a device being manufactured.
Yes, the intentions are great, but in the end, the Jihadists will simply use other weapons that don't have this feature while at the same time this feature endangers the very people it is meant to protect.
Now the Feds want Apple to make a backdoor into their products.
If I lose my smartphone I do not want criminals to empty my bank accounts, learn the codes to my credit cards, access my voicemails, learn personal details of my life, discover my business secrets, listen to my offline conversations or turn on my camera - thus making liberty and freedom meaningless.
We have a Fifth Amendment for a good reason: it's not to protect the guilty but to protect the innocent. The government should not go to a pharmaceutical company and demand that they make a drug that will open the backdoor to anyone's brain and spill their guts whether they like it or not. What would be the point of the notion of the right not to incriminate oneself if the government could inject any poor shlub who invoked the Fifth and forced all the secrets to come out? If the government had this drug, so would the criminal, so would the Jihadist.
A world where evil people can elicit secrets and vulnerabilities from anyone they capture is not a world I want to live in.
CNN, 17 Feb 2016, Tim Cook says the FBI wants Apple to 'hack' your iPhone
"The government is asking Apple to hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers," Cook said. "The same engineers who built strong encryption into the iPhone to protect our users would, ironically, be ordered to weaken those protections and make our users less safe."
Before any of my readers object that the FBI is only asking for Apple to hack into this one particular iPhone 5C, it only takes a few keystrokes to change the text in a warrant and so make it apply to any smartphone.
I have written a number of disparaging articles about Apple, but this time they got it right. Apple should not make a backdoor into their products - no matter what.
