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Apple Should Not Hack The iPhone, Really Good Reasons
As the war of words wages, and slow-motion litigation is used for promotion and commotion, we wanted to weigh with our perspectives from a consumer and retail stance. Let’s just start by saying its a bad idea to force Apple to build a backdoor into hundreds of millions of iPhones.
First, since the NSA already logs all calls of everyone in the United States pre-emptively, the government has a record of all the phone calls and text messages coming and going in and out of that phone. If there was something there – presumably the NSA or FBI would already have run down those leads.
Second, it’s not just opening one phone – once that code is written, hundreds of millions of iPhones can be hacked – that is something we really don’t want the government – ours or others – to be able to do. And once the backdoor exists, every government on the planet is going to cogitate reasons why it has a “legal need” to get a copy of that backdoor. Every district attorney in the United States will be lining up for the same thing. This is like opening Pandora’s box. Heck, whatever Pandora kept in her box would likely have been just as precious as what we keep on our iPhones. Financial account access is just the tip of the iceberg.
Third, the government has not been very good about keeping things secret. Over twenty million personnel files of government employees have been stolen. That includes social security numbers, phone numbers, family member information and much more. If our government can’t keep that kind of data secret, it surely cannot keep anything else a secret.
“Backdoors don’t differentiate among the government, terrorists, state sponsored cyber criminals or organized crime.
Obama’s recent rhetoric at SXSW was a crowd pleaser, but to the wrong crowd. The President’s stance on the Apple/FBI saga completely missed the mark among the tech-savvy attendees at the conference, and this represents the bigger challenge at hand – regarding how politicians and the general public don’t understand the technical intricacies of the privacy vs protection issue nor the repercussions around creating any backdoor access to data.
The concept can be likened to TSA approved locks which are approved because the TSA have the special key to open them but now as a result so does any criminal or casual bag thief.
Giving the master key to government officials poses a greater risk to the people’s freedom, as once an access point is created, this can be exploited by other governments (think corporate espionage for economic gain), blue chip criminals looking to grow their black hat hacking careers, or terrorists. Creating a backdoor to access data in order to ‘protect the people’ is very likely to backfire in ways that we probably cannot imagine.
When we think of our mobile devices as an extension of our own minds, filled with personal and private information, such as photos and messages to friends and family, why would we want to hand this over to anyone other than the intended recipients? Backdoors open this up to not only the government but also anyone else with potentially more nefarious intentions.”
