Small Town News

Cheers to Apple: Keep the government out of our iPhones

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JOURNAL EDITORIAL

Apple technologies have had a long and loving relationship with the newspaper industry. The same is true of most businesses that might be loosely denned as somehow associated with the arts.

That's because Apple's vision was always to be user-friendly, intuitive and dependable.

How they did all that, few of us know, but they did really do all that and have been the most widely used machinery of the press since the mid-1980s.

So we're prejudiced in our defense of Apple as they stand up to our federal government which seeks to force them to create software that would allow the Feds to unlock whatever useful data might be found in Syed Rizan Farook's iPhone.

Farook and his wife were the domestic terrorists who attacked Farook's workplace in San Bernardino last year, leaving 14 people dead and 22 others wounded.

No doubt the government hopes to put to rest any concerns that Farook was working with other domestic (or foreign) terrorists. If there are clues locked within that iPhone that could prevent further killings, the Feds argue, Apple must help unlock those clues.

Apple disagrees and we're taking their side.

The Feds charged last week that Apple simply wants to protect its brand, as if that's a silly notion when compared to American lives.

It's hard to defend any reason that might cost human lives, but there are plenty out there (dropping two atomic bombs that killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens to prevent the further loss of American lives comes to mind).

Like most Americans, we want our government to protect us — our founders wrote as much into the preamble of our constitution, to "ensure domestic tranquility."

But with the explosion of hackers bent on stealing private information, credit cards, bank accounts and the like, we are somewhat reassured that there seems to be at least one device, an iPhone, that appears to be hack-proof.

If the government can't get in there, good for iPhone.

Apple users have long been proud that their computers are, for the most part, free of viruses and rarely are hit with malware, spyware or hackers.

And for business owners who pay a premium to use Apple products, well security and dependability are about the only justification for paying more for their product.

So to force Apple to create a back door to eliminate that protection will, indeed, ruin their business model.



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