Apple Bosses: FBI Wants Something “too Dangerous to Create”

Apple have released a letter to their customers explaining how the FBI have requested they develop an addition to the iPhone which would allow authorities access to users private information.

A federal judge ordered Apple to help the FBI unlock the iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters of the December 2nd terrorist attacks.

But bosses at Apple fear the implications of such an addition would have the potential to threaten data security on a much wider scale.

Image Credit: Yutaka Tsutano (Flickr)

Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO said in the letter:

“We have great respect for the professionals at the FBI, and we believe their intentions are good. Up to this point, we have done everything that is both within our power and within the law to help them. But now the U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create. They have asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone.”

As the Washington Post explains:

“The order, signed Tuesday by a magistrate judge in Riverside, Calif., does not ask Apple to break the phone’s encryption but rather to disable the feature that wipes the data on the phone after 10 incorrect tries at entering a password. That way, the government can try to crack the password using “brute force” — attempting tens of millions of combinations without risking the deletion of the data.”

Read the letter here.