Apple Stands Firm Against US Government, Refuses to Crack San Bernardino Killer’s iPhone

This episode of Device Squad – Apple Stands Firm Against FBI, the podcast for the mobile enterprise, features a roundtable discussion with Mobile Strategists Nitin Bhatia & Glenn Gruber, Hosted by Steven Brykman

Apple is thus far rejecting a judge’s order to help the FBI hack into the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters, calling the action “an overreach by the U.S. government.”

A public letter released February 16th from Apple CEO Tim Cook warns that building “a backdoor to the iPhone” would open not just the phone but also a Pandora’s box that would be “something we consider too dangerous to create.”

The order is that Apple enter Passcodes by cable/PC, disable the wipe-after-10-tries feature, remove the timeout between attempts, and somehow install the software to make this possible onto a locked iPhone 5C.

The question is: if Apple can be ordered to install something on any locked phone what else can they be ordered to install? And what other countries could order Apple to install the same “Master Key”? China? Russia? And once it’s known that Apple possesses this capability, mightn’t it then be misused by anyone (including any foreign government) that knows—or can figure out—how to exploit it?