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Tim Cook Defends Apple's Approach To Security: 'Encryption is Inherently Great' (businessinsider.com)
Apple CEO Tim Cook has once again defended his company's hardline approach to security. At Utah Tech Tour event while taking questions from the audience, Cook said, (via BusinessInsider):"This is one of the biggest issues that we face. Encryption is what makes the public safe. As you know, there are people kept alive because the grid is up. If our grid goes down, if there was a grid attack, the public's safety is at risk" -- hence the need for encryption to protect it. "You can imagine defence systems need encryption, because there are a few bad actors in the world who might like to attack those. [...] Some people have tried to make it out to be bad," the chief executive told the audience at the Utah question-and-answer session. "Encryption is inherently great, and we would not be a safe society without it. So this is an area that is very, very important for us... as you can tell from our actions earlier this year, we throw all of ourselves into this." he added. "We're very much standing on principle here."
I like the fact that encryption protects my logins to my bank, or going online to pay my taxes.
There's no in-between; you either support security you you support insecurity. If you're not for encryption, you're for public revelations of all personal data. As such, please post your credit card numbers, address, SSN, phone number, PIN, etc., because without encryption any time you type that into anything, you should expect *someone* is doing the digital equivalent of looking over your shoulder.
Furthermore, in order to have free speech, you need to *protect it*. Encryption allows this to a significant degree, so whistleblowers and political dissidents can actually communicate violations without ending up shot in the head on a shitty cellar floor next to their loved ones.
You know what's even greater than encryption?
Not collecting personal data in the first place.
If Apple didn't gather massive amounts of information about their suckers - I mean, "customers" - they wouldn't need to worry about encryption and they wouldn't need to worry about safe-guarding the information.