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Tim Cook Talks About Encryption, Right to Privacy, Public Safety, and DOJ (time.com)
TIME reporters sat down with Apple CEO, Tim Cook, to talk about encryption, public safety, and right to privacy among other subjects. The wide-ranging interview captures Cook's discomfort with how his company has been treated by the Department of Justice. Following are some interesting excerpts from the interview: The thing that is different to me about Messages versus your banking institution is, the part of you doing business with the bank, they need to record what you deposited, what your withdrawals are, what your checks that have cleared. So they need all of this information. That content they need to possess, because they report it back to you. That's the business they're in. Take the message. My business is not reading your messages. I don't have a business doing that. And it's against my values to do that. I don't want to read your private stuff. So I'm just the guy toting your mail over. That's what I'm doing. So if I'm expected to keep your messages, and everybody else's, then there should be a law that says, you need to keep all of these. [...] Law enforcement should not be whining about iPhones; it should be rolling around in all the other free information that criminals and terrorists are spewing through social networks and Nest thermostats, surveillance cameras and Hello Barbies. [...] Going dark -- this is a crock. No one's going dark.
You should see what they did to Lavabit under the guise of security.
Holy fucking shit.
https://twitter.com/JZdziarski
They were literally denied their 4th Amendment rights by a FUCKING FEDERAL JUDGE.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
It's not just because their customers want access to their banking history but because there are federal laws such as the Bank Secrecy Act (https://www.fdic.gov/regulations/safety/manual/section8-1.pdf) that require banks to keep banking information to aid in the governments monitoring of criminal activity and money laundering. If the federal government can compel banks to keep this information I'm not sure what prevents them from compelling Apple as well. This is not to say that I support the government's position on this - I'm wholly in Apple's corner. But Cook's analogy to the banking industry is actually a case against Apple rather than one that supports it.