The government is asking Apple to hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers — including tens of millions of American citizens — from sophisticated hackers and cybercriminals. 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.
We can find no precedent for an American company being forced to expose its customers to a greater risk of attack. For years, cryptologists and national security experts have been warning against weakening encryption. Doing so would hurt only the well-meaning and law-abiding citizens who rely on companies like Apple to protect their data. Criminals and bad actors will still encrypt, using tools that are readily available to them.
We all saw this coming. This moment when someone would have to round up the public and shed light on what’s going on. As my remark in a linked piece just 2 weeks ago stated, “This is going to become a huge issue in 2016. I don’t foresee the FBI letting up on this topic.”
2016 will be the year that the last holdouts of our personal data roll-over or fight. Apple has the resources to fight and I’ve never been more happy to be an Apple customer. They’re fighting to protect all of the safe-guards I have in place to keep my data outside of others’ hands. it’s good to know that Touch ID, long passwords, pre-shared keys, 2048 bit encryption and using technologies like FileVault will continue to pay off.