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.

Comments

Re:Why not restore the original iCloud password ha

[smooth wombat]

Or, even better, had the County employee(s) in charge of managing the phones done their job and put MDM software on the phone, this wouldn't be an issue. The County could have been given the court order to unlock the phone and ten seconds later told the FBI, "Here ya go."

As I have said in previous posts, I did this for a government agency I worked for. I was the one put in charge to develop the procedures to secure the phone, including turning off Siri and cloud backup (the users were told no documents were to be put on the phone). Without exception every iPhone we got had MDM software put on it despite the whining from some about being tracked. As I told one guy, "We're not tracking you, we're tracking the phone. We don't care about you. We care about our equipment."

On a few occasions I was asked by a user to unlock their phone because they forgot their passcode so I know how easy this procedure is. As I said above, it is literally ten seconds to unlock the phone with this software installed.