Description
In December 2015, a husband-and-wife terrorist team killed fourteen people at an office holiday party in San Bernardino, California. While investigating this incident, the FBI obtained one of the killers' smartphones, which was an iPhone-5c, manufactured by Apple.
A dispute developed between the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and Apple when the FBI requested Apple's assistance in bypassing the phone's password protection.
For this assignment, post to the Discussion Area your response to the following:
- What kind of information did the FBI hope to learn by unlocking the iPhone? Why was this phone considered so important that the DOJ felt the need to take Apple to court?
- Consider that the phone's owner was killed immediately after the terror attack. Why should Apple resist giving the FBI access to the contents of the phone?
In the wake of this dispute, President Obama called on technology companies to provide the FBI with the ability to bypass password protection on smartphones. He said:
If technologically it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system where the encryption is so strong that there is no key, there's no door at all, then how do we apprehend the child pornographer, how do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot? What mechanisms do we have available to even do simple things like tax enforcement because if in fact you can't crack that at all, government can't get in, then everybody is walking around with a Swiss bank account in their pocket (Mason, 2016, para. 3).
- Discuss the conflict between security and privacy concerns that this situation illustrates. Explain whether you believe the smartphone manufacturers should be forced to provide the government with a "key" to unlock password-protected phones. Explain your reasoning.
Reference: Mason, J. (2016). Aiming to sidestep Apple dispute, Obama makes case for access to device data. Reuters. Retrieved from
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-encryption...
Explanation & Answer
Attached.
Running head: PRIVACY PROTECTION
1
Privacy Protection
Student’s Name
Instructor’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
Date
PRIVACY PROTECTION
What kind of information did the FBI hope to learn by unlocking the iPhone?
By unlocking the mobile phone, the investigators would access crucial information that
would help track other criminals and suppress other criminal activities that the criminals had
been planning (Baily et al., 2017). For instance, the phone keeps track of every location that the
user had visited over a specified period. Therefore, the forensics would identify where the crime
was planned and where the criminal came from.
Additionally, unlocking the phone, text messages, and phone call logs of the criminal
would be identified (Hack, 2016). Consequently, this would make the forensics work easy since
they would have other criminals’ phone numbers and previous conversations. Finally, with the
sophistication in technology, most of the phones have contact images, and therefore other
criminals' images would be generated by just accessing one criminal’s phonebook.
Consider that the phone's owner was killed immediately after the terror attack. Why
should Apple resist giving the FBI access to the contents of the phon...
Review
Review
