Summary: The recent court sessions scheduled was postponed after the Department of Justice requested it. The FBI decided to postpone it until after they have assessed if this new method to break into the iPhone is successful. According to them, a third-party has reached out to them and provided a possible new way to break into the iPhone that has been troubling them for so long. In case you don't know, the FBI has the phone of the terrorist who committed the terror attack in San Bernardino, California and has been trying to break into it to get information. They are afraid that if they try to put in the passcode, that the terrorist has the feature turned on where it deletes all of the data after 10 failed passcode attempts. The FBI has continually tried to get Apple to develop something so that they can bypass this and get into the phone. Apple has refused in case this software could eventually be used by hackers. Apple has actually made security even tighter since then and has been working on a software that even their developers wouldn't be able to hack.
Analysis: I think that Apple should make an exception due to the circumstances in which people were murdered for no reason except to make other innocent people afraid. At the same time, I see where Apple is coming from so that no hacker got ahold of this software, but what if they created it offline, in conjunction with the FBI and destroyed the software after they used it? The problem of a hacker making it after that wouldn't have been the cause of Apple, it would be the hacker being good enough to code that. This reminds me of the Cuban Missile Crisis in which we didn't know what was going on in Cuba and then cut ties with them for conspiring to harm the US. There isn't many, if not, any, cases in US History exactly like this as we see how technology is really changing us and the Justice System.
Link: http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/21/technology/doj-apple-hearing/index.html
This is a very interesting conflict. I wonder about Apple's decision to publicize the whole thing, because I read somewhere that Apple should have let the FBI in, but without telling the public. I think that in that scenario, if people ever found out, they would be even more paranoid about privacy.
ReplyDelete- Isabella Montague 5th period