Tim Cook says Apple will fight US gov’t over court-ordered iPhone backdoor

Apple chief Tim Cook has attacked the recent court order that compels Apple to unlock and decrypt the San Bernardino gunman's iPhone. "Opposing this order is not something we take lightly. We feel we must speak up in the face of what we see as an overreach by the US government," says an open letter published by Cook early this morning.

Late yesterday, a federal judge in California ordered Apple to help the US government (the FBI) unlock and decrypt the iPhone 5C belonging to Syed Rizwan Farook, who shot up an office party in San Bernardino in December 2015.

In the past, Apple has helped extract data from iPhones when issued with an appropriate warrant. Since iOS 8, however, full encryption has been enabled by default-a move that was seemingly introduced specifically to prevent such data-grabs by governments. "Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data," the company wrote on its website at the time. "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."

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