Federighi: FBI wants to "turn back the clock to a less-secure time"

Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering at Apple, penned this opinion piece in the Washington Post.That's why it's so disappointing that the FBI, Justice Department and others in law enforcement are pressing us to turn back the clock to a less-secure time and less-secure technologies. They have suggested that the safeguards of iOS 7 were good enough and that we should simply go back to the security standards of 2013. But the security of iOS 7, while cutting-edge at the time, has since been breached by hackers. What's worse, some of their methods have been productized and are now available for sale to attackers who are less skilled but often more malicious.To get around Apple's safeguards, the FBI wants us to create a backdoor in the form of special software that bypasses passcode protections, intentionally creating a vulnerability that would let the government force its way into an iPhone. Once created, this software - which law enforcement has conceded it wants to apply to many iPhones - would become a weakness that hackers and criminals could use to wreak havoc on the privacy and personal safety of us all.I can't emphasize enough how important it is to stand side-by-side with Apple on this one. In France, they just voted to put technology executives of companies unwilling to decrypt their products in jail.