Cook doubles down for Apple backdoors

Apple's Tim Cook has doubled down in its protection of a dead Moslem terrorist. NPR radio reports:

"The only way to get information — at least currently, the only way we know — would be to write a piece of software that we view as sort of the equivalent of cancer. We think it's bad news to write. We would never write it. We have never written it — and that is what is at stake here," Cook said. "We believe that is a very dangerous operating system."

The government has said that the software key would be limited in scope, but Cook rejected that characterization.

"This case is not about one phone. This case is about the future," Cook said. "If we knew a way to get the information on the phone — that we haven't already given — if we knew a way to do this, that would not expose hundreds of millions of other people to issues, we would obviously do it. ... Our job is to protect our customers."

Following the federal magistrate's ruling, Cook posted a statement on Apple's website which argued the government was effectively ordering Apple to put its customers at risk by compromising their privacy. "We can find no precedent for an American company being forced to expose its customers to a greater risk of attack," Cook wrote.

But that's not exactly true, NPR tech reporter Aarti Shahani says.

Yes, Cook is lying.

Cook pretends that he is standing for customer ownership of its own data, for privacy, and against universal crypto backdoors, but the truth is the opposite.

In this case, the customer is a state agency, and it wants its own data. Cook is refusing. The terrorist is dead, and has no privacy rights.

According to published reports, Apple has the ability to update the firmware of a particular iphone by using a digitally signed data file that is customized for the serial number of that phone, and such that the update will not work on a phone with any other serial number. The signature prevents the file from being modified to work on another phone. So the update file could not be used for any other purpose by the FBI or anyone else. It also has been reported that Apple could do tne update itself, so the FBI does not need to get that update file.

Assuming that is true, then Cook is lying and no other users or phones are at risk. If it is not true, then Apple has specifically engineered the phone to have a universal backdoor. No one ever required Apple to have a universal backdoor, so it would have had to make a deliberate decision to do that for its own business purposes.

So Cook's position is that Apple and Apple alone owns customer iphone data, and that it has the right to install backdoors for its own business purposes while thwarting a Moslem terrorist investigation.

Cook's previous political stances have all had to do with promoting LGBT activism and his own homosexuality. But he does not really stand for individual gay rights, and instead stands against the religious freedom of others. He is a leftist creep who wants everyone else to be forced to accept his gay-leftist values.

Cook is damaging the cause of personal data privacy. Cook is going to lose this court case, and the public is going to conclude that Apple is being unreasonable. The privacy organizations are controlled by leftists who have been baited into supporting Apple, and that means they are against any sort of real personal data autonomy. Leftism is all about control, and Apple wants control of your data.

Rush Limbaugh is an Apple fanboy, and he suggests that Apple may configure the upcoming iphone 7 so that the user can set a password that not even Apple is able to break. That would be legal for Apple to do, even if it loses the current case. Whether Apple chooses to do this is purely a business decision, Rush says, but Apple may not do it because of the unhappy customers who forget their passwords. Apple does not want to lose those customers.

I do not know whether Apple's business interest is to offer genuine privacy in the iphone 7 or not. But it does not make any sense to me to have a system where Apple can recover data, but the FBI cannot see that data in a court-ordered Moslem terrorist investigation.