When Apple’s legal team credibly argued against the 1789 All Writs Act last week, exposing all its flaws and incompatibilities with other existing pieces of legislation, the Department of Justice (DOJ) was angered and unconsciously revealed what it really wanted in the first place; Apple’s source code.
A software source code is a company’s crown jewel of its entire business. It contains the software’s roadmap, security vulnerabilities and weaknesses that can be used by government agencies to conduct surveillance or collect evidence for customers’ ongoing investigations. All I am trying to say is that the source code is an electronic strong room’s key for any software.
FBI has been looking for an occasion to hoax Apple into revealing its encryption scheme in iOS for the iPhone. The iPhone 5C belonging to Farook, the shooter for the Bernadino’s shooting case seems to be the perfect chance. It is opportune because it has a great potential to seek people’s sympathy.
“This burden, which is not unreasonable, is the direct result of Apple’s deliberate marketing decision to engineer its products so that the government cannot search them even with a warrant”, the DOJ said to echo FBI’s frustrations with the iPhone.
That assertion is, however, faulty because nowhere does Apple market iPhone’s encryption prowess.
The the DOJ continued to unleash its wrath, “the FBI cannot modify the software on Farook’s iPhone without access to the source code and apple’s private electronic signature. The government did not seek to compel Apple to turn those over because it believed such a request would be less palatable to Apple. If Apple would prefer that course, however, that may provide an alternative that requires less labour by Apple programmers.”
The US government can ably force Apple to surrender its source code by seeking clandestine ruling authorized by the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance ACT (FISA). Hearings are done in hush-hush and away from the public gaze. Tech companies hit by these demands need miracles to win.
In 2013, the government convinced FISA to order Lavabit, an encrypted email provider said to have been used by Edward Snowden to turnover its source code and private keys to FBI. Lavabit stunned FISA, it refused and opted to wind up its business.
There are companies that have complied to such orders before. Western digital, Seagate, Maxtor and Samsung have been rumoured to have supplied source code to NSA for their hard drive products. What did NSA do with the source codes? They quietly installed software to eavesdrop on computers around the world. Because of this, Dell, Huawei and Juniper servers were attacked through various exploits.
After Edward revelations about the existence of Prism where tech companies that people trusted with their data were handing over the same to FBI in situations where no warrants had been fulfilled, Apple has no reason to trust FBI and NSA.
Craig Federighi, Apple’s software chief said that Apple has never provided any government with its proprietary source code. That is another way of saying that Apple will not do it this time around.
What does this mean? Will Apple go the way of Lavabit? No, Apple is a technological crown jewel of USA. At the end of the day, Apple will heavily be fined but will come out of this much stronger. The case continues to entertain.
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