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Apple and the Trump administration are facing off publicly over the tech company’s refusal to let officials access the iPhone of the Pensacola gunman. CNBC’s Jon Fortt and Steve Kovach, tech editor for CNBC.com, join “Squawk Box” to discuss Tim Cook’s impact on Apple since taking over for Steve Jobs nearly 10 years ago.
President Donald Trump and the nation’s top law enforcement official are facing off against Apple, the most valuable American company.
The fight started because the FBI says it cannot extract data from two iPhones used by Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, who is suspected of killing three people last month in a shooting at a Navy base in Pensacola, Florida. Attorney General William Barr and Trump want Apple to help by unlocking the phones it manufactured.
Although the current fight is over these two password-protected phones, it’s only the latest skirmish in a long-running battle over whether technology companies should give law enforcement special access to customers’ data.
Barr and other law enforcement officials call it the “going dark” problem and argue that all data should be accessible with a warrant. Apple and techies tend to call the concept a “backdoor” and argue that it would hurt security for everyone who uses that device.
During Barr’s press conference Monday, he explicitly framed the issue as bigger than just the two Pensacola iPhones: “We call on Apple and other technology companies to help us find a solution so that we can better protect the lives of Americans and prevent future attacks.”
Barr also discussed his goal last summer, months before the Pensacola shooting: “The Department has made clear what we are seeking. We believe that when technology providers deploy encryption in their products, services, and platforms they need to maintain an appropriate mechanism for lawful access.”
Apple is not against helping law enforcement. But it objects to building a general method that could be used to break encryption, arguing that it will have unintended consequences.
“Backdoors can also be exploited by those who threaten our national security and the data security of our customers. Today, law enforcement has access to more data than ever before in history, so Americans do not have to choose between weakening encryption and solving investigations,” an Apple representative said in a statement earlier this week.
Apple’s not the only company in this pickle. Pretty much every single major piece of digital technology uses encryption to protect information from prying eyes. Barr took aim at Facebook last year, for example, for the encryption it uses in WhatsApp.
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