Trump urges boycott in US-Apple showdown

The government is seeking Apple’s help in disabling a feature that wipes data from the phone when too many attempts are made to guess the passcode. Other leading tech companies were initially silent when the case erupted.

The two Apple executives said they felt in good company, noting that Trump has faulted many other groups and individuals. The confrontation centers on a device that may hold information about a terrorist attack, but it has far-reaching consequences for encryption and the debate between privacy and security.

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said his company would refuse to “hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers”.

Friday’s motion by the Justice Department seems intended less for the court in Riverside than the court of public opinion.

In a series of tweets posted after the rally, Donald Trump also advised his followers to boycott Apple and its products.

“Apple has attempted to design and market its products to allow technology, rather than the law, to control access to data which has been found by this Court to be warranted for an important investigation”.

The federal request “is very strategic on their part, to be sure” said Robert Cattanach, a former Justice Department lawyer who handles cyber-security cases for the Dorsey & Whitney law firm. “They have asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone”, he said in a message to customers this week.

The White House so far has stood behind the Federal Bureau of Investigation in its battle with Apple Inc.

Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Apple has loudly refused, which raises the question: what’s next and what happened here? Apple has one week to respond to the judge’s earlier order.

Apple’s resistance is “based on its concern for its business model and public brand marketing strategy”, prosecutors wrote.

The iPhone, property of San Bernardino County, was used as a work phone by health department employee Syed Farook, who along with his wife, Tashfeen Malik, carried out a mass shooting on December 2, 2015, killing 14 and wounding 22 in San Bernardino, California.

“They don’t want to open up the phones”.

This is because of the tech giant’s refusal to help federal authorities unlock the iPhone that is believed to be owned by one of the gunmen involved in the San Bernardino shootings.

“The phone’s not even owned by this young thug that killed all these people”, Trump continued.

According to senior Apple executives, in an attempt to access the device soon after the attack, someone at the county changed the iCloud ID password, preventing a potential iCloud backup. But the more times Apple (or Google, should it be on the receiving end of a similar order) installs a spoofed operating system to help authorities hack into a phone, the greater the likelihood that the code will fall into the wrong hands.