They pushed back on that after falsely telling their customers that they were technically incapable of helping the FBI with such requests. After this incident, they no longer make that claim. https://appleinsider.com/articles/14/09/18/apple-says-incapa...
They never told customers it was technically infeasible. From the contemporaneous Q&A from the 2016 letter opposing coerced access:
“ Is it technically possible to do what the government has ordered?
Yes, it is certainly possible to create an entirely new operating system to undermine our security features as the government wants. But it’s something we believe is too dangerous to do. The only way to guarantee that such a powerful tool isn’t abused and doesn’t fall into the wrong hands is to never create it.”
Apple: "So it's not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running iOS 8."
Also, "create an entirely new operating system" is an intentionally misleading exaggeration on Apple's part, meant to fool customers but not governments. It makes it sound like the amount of work they would have to do is larger than changing one constant about how many retries are allowed and another constant controlling rate liming, build and sign and flash it to the phone, and delete it after.
Seems like a semantic quibble about the meaning of “technically feasible.” If you understand it as making claims about the system as it exists, it is true. If you understand it as making a claim about what Apple could theoretically do in all circumstances, then you have an absurd definition because everything is technically feasible.
I think the FAQ and letter both make clear that Apple could comply with the FBI request and their objection was over whether they should be forced to.
> If you understand it as making a claim about what Apple could theoretically do in all circumstances, then you have an absurd definition because everything is technically feasible.
If iOS 8 required a user key for updating the system, this would be technically infeasible. It's not technically infeasible as iOS 8 was implemented, so Apple stopped claiming it is, but only after the FBI embarrassed them about that claim.
> their objection was over whether they should be forced to.
Apple's objection had nothing about being forced to do it. They were forced to provide data from devices before iOS 8 and even provided a document about how to ask them to do it. Apple instead made specious claims about how hard it was and how it would affect other customers' privacy.
Can somebody explain the room for debate and expression of sentiment here? If Apple was legally required to do x in regards to privacy, I have to assume they would and everyone could know they would (because it does not seem very big US company to outright defy national law). If they were not, on what ground, could the gov pressure Apple?
The theory would be that it would be extralegal pressure. Out of the Snowden era, for this generation, came the belief that the government would use extralegal coercion to get what they want when it comes to domestic espionage. This showed up in eg how the government battled Yahoo over PRISM [0], and the story of Joseph Nacchio of QWest [1] supposedly being targeted by the Feds for refusing to go along with the program/s.
For prior generations, Hoover, Nixon, MLK (how they targeted him), the Church hearings, and many other things provided evidence as to the extralegal behavior of the government at times.
Like when they started recording what programs you launch on your Mac, sent to them in cleartext? Or when they force you to have an account with them to install apps from the official sources (and of course the unofficial ones are absolutely atrocious).
Apple are better on the privacy front than their competitors, but not by that much.
Given what we learned from the Snowden leaks, I would be willing to believe that any PR in apples favor is awarded by the govt for exchange of their cooperation relating to providing the govt data / access they request.
I don't trust any corporation to actually side against the govt.
