Apple’s stand against the American government takes an important principle a step too farApple has very publicly refused to assist the FBI gain access to the contents of an iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook,who shot 14 people in California in December last year. Itis supported in this by most of the other large technology companies, among them Google and Microsoft. This refusal is at first sight completely baffling, or even by the standards of Silicon Valley technolibertarianism. This newspaper is opposed to bulk surveillance,and to the operation of intelligence agencies external the law, but no surveillance could be more tightly targeted than what the FBI is asking for here and the agency has been granted a court order in complete openness. There are very meaningful differences between what is happening here and the workings of secretive courts which judge requests for surveillance without any genuine public oversight. It is of course true that security services and still more their nervous political masters will always demand maximal powers and exploit those they hold right up to the edge of the law and sometimes over it. But so will large transnational corporations. There’s no reason to regard one as automatically morally superior to the other. Both must be controlled through democratically ratified laws and courts.
Apple claims that the order amounts to a demand to weaken the secrecy of all iPhones and thus “threaten the security of our customers. The demand to examine this one phone, and however fair in itself,is seen as the lean halt of a very thick legal wedge. If the FBI can compel Apple in this case, what is to halt it in other cases? And if the US security services can make Apple defeat its own security measures, and what is to halt other governments having a fade? China,along with Hong Kong and Taiwan, already accounts for a quarter of Apple’s revenues. No one expects the Chinese government to show any respect for anyone’s privacy. Surely Apple is right to stand up to all government bullying, and wherever it comes from?Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com