Apple CEO commits to annual dividend raise, says is advocate for privacy

“Apple strongly supports, and will continue to support, the efforts of law enforcement in pursuing justice against terrorists and other criminals – just as it has in this case and many others”, the company said in its filing, known as a motion to vacate.

In case you haven’t been following Apple news for the past couple of weeks, the company has been thrown into a legal battle with the American FBI over an iPhone and its encryption.

“Here, by contrast, the government has failed to demonstrate that the requested order was absolutely necessary to effectuate the search warrant, including that it exhausted all other avenues for recovering information”, the motion filed by Apple reads.

Google now plans to file a “friend of the court” brief on Apple’s behalf within the next week, a person familiar with the situation said. Even as Apple was preparing to formally respond to the court, other technology companies – which have until now been cautious in their support of Apple – were preparing to be more forceful in court.

The only way to get information, at least now the only way we know, is to write a piece of software that we view as sort of the software equivalent of cancer.

One guy asked how Apple planned to pivot towards being a services business when he couldn’t get his Beats Music and Apple Music accounts to sync up (Cook promised someone would take care of his technical issues). Overall, though, the company’s stock has declined in recent months over worries that iPhone sales were slowing around the world.

Earlier Thursday, FBI Director James Comey reiterated his position at a hearing on Capitol Hill.

The iPhone in question was used by Farook, who along with his wife went on a shooting rampage in December that killed 14 and wounded 22.

It accused the government of working under a closed courtroom process under the auspices of a terrorism investigation of trying “to cut off debate and circumvent thoughtful analysis”.

“Our goal is to find a solution that allows law enforcement to effectively enforce the law without harming the competitiveness of U.S. encryption providers or the privacy protections of USA citizens”, said a statement from Judiciary chairman Bob Goodlatte, a Republican from Virginia, and ranking Democrat John Conyers of MI.

Nevertheless, Comey conceded that the case would have an impact on future government requests to technology companies.

After a week of near-silence on the issue, Microsoft President Brad Smith publicly backed Apple in its ongoing fight with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, reports the Seattle Times. Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the congressional panel, also warned that “I don’t see a limiting principle” in the Apple case.

“If we’re going to move to a world where that is not possible anymore, the world will not end – but it will be a different world than where we are today and where we were in 2014”, he said.