Major Players Take Sides In Apple's Encryption Battle
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — Both anger and praise have surfaced in response to Apple's decision not to comply with a court order to help the FBI hack into an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino mass shooting suspects.
"That magnitude of a crime, especially, you have no right to your privacy or anything else," said Julie Swann-Paez.
For Swann-Paez, it's personal. She was one of the San Bernardino shooting survivors shot twice in the pelvis.
"I can see once you open the door to allowing that break in the encryption, what are the guidelines for that," she said.
A U.S. magistrate ordered Apple to bypass the security on Syed Rizwan Farook's county-issued iPhone to help put a timeline together.
"There is still 18 minutes of time from Syed and his wife missing time of what they were doing," Swann-Paez said.
But Apple maintains that they would have to make new software; essentially, a master key that would unlock millions of devices.
"It's an unprecedented use of this statutory authority and it does have implications for everyone's privacy and security," said Esha Bhandari, an attorney, via Skype.
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Bhandari is an attorney with ACLU's Speech, Privacy & Technology project.
They filed a Freedom of Information Act request, saying the government has used a 200-year-old law to force tech companies to comply.
"What it's been used for in this case is for something truly extraordinary, which is forcing a third-party company to serve as an agent of law enforcement," Bhandari said.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai tweeted support, saying "forcing companies to enable hacking could compromise users' privacy."
But lawmakers like California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said "we have every responsibility and duty to see that Apple provides that information."
At the town hall Thursday night in Las Vegas, both presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were asked whose side they were on.
They both had similar answers: It's complicated. They asked that Apple and the FBI find a middle ground.
Meanwhile, antivirus software creator John McAfee said he and his team of hackers could unlock the phone, but there is no word if anyone has taken his offer seriously yet.
Apple has four days to appeal.
