Should Apple help DOJ unlock terrorist's iPhones?

Why won't Apple give law enforcement the virtual keys to unlock two iPhones used in last month's terrorist act in Florida? That question is at the center of a debate between the company and the FBI. 

Attorney General William Barr declared Monday that the shooting at a Navy base in Pensacola was an act of terrorism and that Apple hasn't provided federal investigators “substantive assistance” in offering a way into the phones past encryption and security features, or a so-called backdoor. 

Apple pushed back with a strongly worded rebuttal, saying it helped investigators within hours of the FBI’s first request Dec. 6 and in subsequent requests, resulting “in many gigabytes of information that we turned over” to them. Such information was found in backups of the phone stored in iCloud rather than directly on the device and included account and transactional data for multiple accounts. "In every instance, we responded with all of the information that we had," Apple wrote in its statement.

The conflict lies in the push and pull of protecting individual privacy versus allowing law enforcement easy access to devices that hold so many of our secrets.

This is the same battle the FBI fought with Apple in 2015, again related to an iPhone used in terrorist acts. After a mass shooting that killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California, the FBI took Apple to court to get the company to unlock an iPhone recovered from one of the shooters. Eventually, the FBI used a third-party contractor to hack into the device.

Question: What is behind Apple’s refusal to create a "backdoor" that would enable law enforcement to circumvent encryption? 

Answer: Apple has long insisted its efforts are all about protecting consumer privacy and the sensitive health and financial data we store on our devices. 

“Encryption is critically important to the services that we have come to rely on,” Apple Senior Director for Global Policy Jane Horvath said last week on a panel at the CES tech industry trade show. “Phones are relatively small, and they get lost and stolen. If you’re going to be able to rely on having our health data and finance data on our devices, then we need to make sure that if you misplace that device, you’re not losing your sensitive data.”

Horvath said that although a backdoor to encryption isn’t the way to tackle the problem of abusive or criminal behavior, Apple has helped solve many cases and prevented suicides with other methods.

According to Apple’s “transparency report,” the company has responded to 127,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement agencies over the past seven years.

Q: Why not create a backdoor just for the "good guys"?  

A: There's no such thing, Apple argues, because such a backdoor could be exploited by malicious entities, including foreign governments who could threaten our national security. On the same CES panel as Horvath, Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter said, “While I am really sensitive to the desire for a backdoor for good legal law enforcement reasons, you can’t create a backdoor for the good guys that doesn’t also create a backdoor for the bad guys.”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called such backdoors a “terrible idea,” though, as The Verge reported, he didn’t give Apple the same full-throttled support this time as he did in 2015 after the San Bernardino attack.  

“We’ve always said we care about these two things: privacy and public safety," he said. "We need some legal and technical solution in our democracy to have both of those be priorities. … We can’t take hard positions on all sides ... (but if they’re) asking me for a backdoor, I’ll say no.” 

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Q: Can the phones be cracked? 

A: As the San Bernardino case played out, the answer proved to be yes, but it’s not easy and not necessarily quick. The FBI announced that the third party that helped it was able to break into a phone used by one of the terrorists in March 2016; the attack took place the previous December.

Even if it was a simpler process and tech companies could build a backdoor for  presumably the right reasons, two enduring questions are who gets to decide who the good guys are, and under what legal, ethical and moral circumstances should investigators be issued the key.

Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow @edbaig on Twitter