What kind of information did the FBI hope to learn by unlocking the iPhone? Why was this phone considered so important that the DOJ felt the need to take Apple to court?
By unlocking the mobile phone, the investigators would access crucial information that would help track other criminals and suppress other criminal activities that the criminals had been planning. For instance, the phone keeps track of every location that the user had visited over a specified period. Therefore, the forensics would identify where the crime was planned and where the criminal came from. Additionally, unlocking the phone, text messages, and phone call logs of the criminal would be identified. Consequently, this would make the forensics work easy since they would have other criminals’ phone numbers and previous conversations. Finally, with the sophistication in technology, most of the phones have contact images, and therefore other criminals’ images would be generated by just accessing one criminal’s phonebook.
Consider that the phone’s owner was killed immediately after the terror attack. Why should Apple resist giving the FBI access to the contents of the phone?
If the phone’s owner had been killed after the attack, Apple Company would resist giving the FBI access to the phone’s content because any other criminal that would be killed, the company would be culpable of disclosing the user’s data, which is against the United States data privacy law.
Discuss the conflict between security and privacy concerns that this situation illustrates.
Currently, most criminal activities are planned using mobile phones, computers, or other communication devices. Therefore, in my opinion, the government investigative agencies like the FBI should be given a key to decrypt user’s passwords, fingerprints, and other security features if doing so is aimed at suppressing crime. This is because, if a ‘backdoor’ is not created, criminals will have confidence that even if the forensics recovered their devices, none of them would be traced. Consequently, criminal activities will increase significantly across the globe. However, by creating a backdoor for the government to access user’s data, the backdoor may also be used by ill-mannered people to perpetrate crime.
Additionally, most device manufacturers have argued that, if security decryptions were to be created, they would lose most of their customers who attribute their brands to high security and data privacy features. Therefore, this situation creates a conflict as the two teams try to satisfy their needs and demands. Another solution would be that once the investigative agencies make such requests, the device manufacturers should decrypt the feature that would automatically delete the user’s data if a wrong password is entered several times. Therefore, the government is left to crack the password as many times as possible without fear that the user’s data will be deleted. In my opinion, this is a better solution instead of developing a password decryption software, which would even increase crime rates.