Federighi: The FBI Wants to Roll Back Security ⇥ washingtonpost.com

Craig Federighi, in an op-ed for the Washington Post:

Security is an endless race — one that you can lead but never decisively win. Yesterday’s best defenses cannot fend off the attacks of today or tomorrow. Software innovations of the future will depend on the foundation of strong device security. We cannot afford to fall behind those who would exploit technology in order to cause chaos. To slow our pace, or reverse our progress, puts everyone at risk.

If the FBI wants to crack this phone on their own, more power to them.1 But conscripting Apple and requiring them to develop new technology to create flaws in their existing security safeguards is wrong. This would have been unfathomable twenty years ago.

  1. I suspect Apple would treat whatever methods they use as a bug report and fix them, for the same reason they fix the root method of a jailbreak: they’re security vulnerabilities, full stop. ↥︎