Apple engineers will not collaborate with the F.B.I. if the U.S. Court says that the company has to unlock the iPhone that belonged to one of the San Bernardino shooters. It appears that many of them would rather frustrate the encryption work, and others would prefer to quit their jobs, according to a report published Thursday.
Last month, Apple’s Chief Executive Timothy Cook said in an email to employees that the government is asking to the same engineers who have built very strong security systems for the iPhone, to weaken strong encryption that protect users, describing it as an ironic situation.
The New York Times seem to suggest that employees involved in the development of mobile devices and security, alongside security engineers and executives, are determined to not to alter the security software that they have created.
Apple’s attorneys have been bold with their declarations, saying that such a request by the F.B.I. is offensive to the company’s values and principles, since altering the security of an iPhone “would pose a severe threat to the autonomy of Apple and its engineers”, as reported by the NYT.
A former senior product manager in Apple’s privacy division said that if engineers quitted their jobs at Apple, they would be well-received in other prestigious companies that are not currently supporting the FBI requests
The company created by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak said last month that a team of 10 engineers and one month of work would be needed to create an iPhone “backdoor”. The NYT said that such a team does not exist inside Apple, where hardware engineers and software developers work on different rooms.
Apple co-founder says that bad people could make use of an iPhone backdoor
The pioneer of the PC revolution and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said on Wednesday that in the future he wants to ask himself how should humans be treated instead of how could the police run everything, adding that he finds honesty and security as very important values.
“So, I come from the side of personal liberties…These are dangerous, dangerous things, and if some code gets written in an Apple product that lets people in, bad people are going to find their way to it, very likely.” He wrote on Wednesday to a Reddit user.
Rumors seem to suggest that the next iPhone will physically block brute force attacks, which means that they would be impenetrable for hackers.
Source: New York Times