Apple Inc. and the U.S. law enforcement had their legal showdown over issues of encryption. But the battle between the company and the FBI will allegedly convince tech companies to boost their efforts to engineer safeguards against government interruption.
According to Reuters, Apple Inc. is already a well-known industry marketing highly secure phones and mobile applications. An executive of the tech company even claimed that the company will do whatever efforts to bolster its encryption if it wins in court battle.
The lawsuit is against the federal government, which last week already secured a court order. It noted that Apple engineers need to help extract data from phone associated with the mass shootings in San Bernardino.
The Apple executive also talked about the issue on a condition of secrecy. The Apple spokesperson even declined to leave a comment publicly regarding the details of the court order.
Moreover, Gadgets 360 reported that if Apple loses the court proceedings, the legal standard is to give the U.S. government broad authority to order other tech companies in breaking into encrypted products. However, if the government will be declared victorious of the court case, U.S. tech companies will potentially wave their investments in security systems that even the their own engineers can't access, stated Jonathan Zittrain, a co-founder of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
Zittrain even said, "A success for the government in this case may further spur Apple and others to develop devices that the makers aren't privileged to crack," he said. In fact, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and others in Silicon Valley have openly showed their support to Apple in the court case. But Microsoft founder Bill Gates believes that tech companies should be compelled to cooperate with the FBI in terrorism investigations, as mentioned in Engineering & Technology Magazine.
The point of this move, as stated by Joey De la Garza, the chief information security officer of a fast-growing storage provider Box, is to make it possible for the company to access its customers' data, even under a government order. He insisted, "Our goal is to achieve a 'zero-knowledge' state" for the company, he said, "where our customers have total control over their data."
Meanwhile, it is still unclear whether Apple can or would even want to make smartphones the company can't access. The employees of the tech company familiar with its security strategy even revealed that Apple had no such plans.
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