Apple to resist order to hack San Bernardino gunman’s iPhone

Apple chief Tim Cook says his company will resist a federal magistrate's order to hack its own users in connection with the investigation into the San Bernardino shootings.

In a statement posted on the company’s website, Mr Cook said such a move would undermine encryption by creating a back door that could potentially be used on other devices.

His letter was a direct response to an order on Tuesday from US Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym for Apple to help the FBI break into an encrypted iPhone belonging to one of the prepetrators of the December attack.

The first-of-its-kind ruling was a significant victory for the US justice department in a technology policy debate that pits digital privacy against national security interests.

Fourteen people were killed and 22 were injured on December 2nd, 2015 when American-born Syed Rizwan Farook (28) and his wife Tashfeen Malik (29) from Pakistan opened fire on Farook's colleagues at an office lunch gathering in San Bernardino, about 60 miles east of Los Angeles.

The couple had pledged allegiance to a leader of the Islamic State group on Facebook moments before the shooting. Both were later killed in a gun battle with police.

The FBI has been investigating the couple’s potential communications with Islamic State, also known as Isis, and other militant groups and treating the case as an incident of domestic terrorism.

“Apple has the exclusive technical means which would assist the government in completing its search, but has declined to provide that assistance voluntarily,” prosecutors said. US government officials have warned that the expanded use of strong encryption is hindering national security and criminal investigations.

Technology experts and privacy advocates counter that forcing US companies to weaken their encryption would make private data vulnerable to hackers, undermine the security of the internet and give a competitive advantage to companies in other countries.

In a similar case last year, Apple told a federal judge in New York that it was “impossible” for the company to unlock its devices that run an operating system of iOS 8 or higher. The phone belonging to the Farook ran on iOS 9, according to prosecutors.

Apple could still help investigators by disabling “non-encrypted barriers that

Apple has coded into its operating system,” says prosecutors.

Apple and Google both adopted strong default encryption in late 2014, amid growing digital privacy concerns spurred in part by the leaks from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. Forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski said Apple might have to write custom code to comply with the order, presenting a novel question to the court about whether the government could order a private company to hack its own device.

Zdziarski said that because the San Bernardino shooting was being investigated as a terrorism case, investigators would be able to work with the NSA and CIA on cracking the phone. Those US intelligence agencies likely could break the iPhone’s encryption without Apple’s involvement, he said.

Agencies