Jessica Bouffard
Professor
March 3rd 2015
Apple vs. FBI
December 2nd 2015, Fourteen Americans were shot dead, leaving twenty-two injured. A man and a woman by the names of Tashfeen Malik and Syed Farook, entered a holiday party at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino and opened fire. The terrorists were killed in a gunfight with police the same day.
Malik and Farook destroyed all their laptops and phones before the attack. Erasing the trail of where they have been and what they have been doing on the Internet. FBI believes they could have been talking to other terrorist and even receiving money from lending websites. The only device left was an Iphone 5C with a passcode to get in. The FBI feels that if they were able to get into the phone, they can see whom the terrorist got their help from. The only problem is the passcode that will destroy all the memory after ten failed attempts to crack the code. With an almost impossible task to complete, the FBI asked Apple to unlock the phone. After consideration Apple decided it would not open it.
Apple is afraid that creating a back door for this one phone is putting all its customers at risk. Hackers and other governments looking for way to break one of the toughest encryptions around will hunt down this “master key”. The FBI pleads that they aren’t looking to go though millions of other phones, but just this one. But Apple isn’t having it. The risk of putting a system out like is just two high. A seemingly easy solution would be to destroy after the use right? Apple’s CEO rebuttals with that, the technology world is not the same as the physical. In the physical world you can destroy something and it is gone forever, but in the world of technology it is never gone for good. He argues that there is just no way in securing the safety of his customers or his company.
The FBI is not backing down. They just want