The war of words between Apple Inc. and the government continued Sunday as FBI Director James Comey said forcing Apple to help unlock the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters is no big deal.
“We don’t want to break anyone’s encryption or set a master key loose on the land,” Comey said in a statement Sunday night, insisting that vital decisions involving safety from terrorists shouldn’t be left in the hands of “corporations that sell stuff for a living.”
A federal judge last week ordered Apple to help investigators gain access to encrypted data on the iPhone 5c used by Syed Rizwan Farook, who with his wife, Tashfeen Malik, killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California, on Dec. 2.
Not even Apple can decrypt the encrypted iPhone, according to the company. What investigators want it to do is help them figure out Farook’s password so they can simply unlock the phone — but they fear that it has a common feature that wipes the data completely after a certain number of failed password entries.
Apple said it wouldn’t comply, arguing that helping the government unlock an encrypted phone would sabotage the entire point of encryption and endanger the privacy of millions of its customers.
Since then, the company and federal authorities have lobbed strongly worded statements at each other. Here’s how the battle has played out: “I hope folks will take a deep breath and stop saying the world is ending, but instead use that breath to talk to each other,” he said. “We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist’s passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a decade to guess correctly.” This article originally appeared on NBCNews.com.
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