The FBI asked the owner of the phone to change the iCloud account password, with the result that the iPhone didn’t back up to iCloud, which would have provided a way for the FBI to access recent (if incomplete) data. Hence there followed the question of whether or not the FBI is complicit in furthering this precedent by engineering the case to require it, and therefore whether or not Apple should help them in their objective. Something about not ascribing to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but you never know with the Feds. :)
Apple now says this is about civil liberties. I think this is a rather strange comment coming from the CEO of Apple—or at least it would certainly have been if the CEO were still Steve Jobs. I'm fairly sure that if liberty is your objective, Apple isn’t the right platform provider. Still, I accept Tim Cook’s personally principled stand in this affair, and genuinely hope good comes of it in the long run. you can’t have too much liberty, and it’s tempting to think that he’s being entirely sincere and is simply unaware of the caveats of what he is suggesting as a solution to government overreach. Unfortunately, that doesn’t change my belief that half-measures are inadequate. Much as I’d love Apple to keep the US government from such extreme forms of intrusion, or for Apple to leave the US for somewhere more privacy-respecting, I doubt very much that this will happen, because ultimately business is more important than principles. It doesn’t solve all the other problems of a central point of failure, either, and it’s not clear to me that the world would be any less free with better cryptography in it, except perhaps for control and convenience freaks like Apple. So Apple is still left with the problem of how to engineer their products so that this simply cannot ever happen again. That is my opinion, anyway. You get to choose yours. :) -- The following information is important for all members of the Mac Visionaries list. If you have any questions or concerns about the running of this list, or if you feel that a member's post is inappropriate, please contact the owners or moderators directly rather than posting on the list itself. Your Mac Visionaries list moderator is Mark Taylor and your owner is Cara Quinn - you can reach Cara at caraqu...@caraquinn.com The archives for this list can be searched at: http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries@googlegroups.com/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
