Michael Chertoff, the former Secretary of U.S. Homeland Security, has warned that the FBI forcing Apple to make an operating system that overcomes the encryption of a terrorist’s iPhone would be the software equivalent of building a biological weapon.
Referring to the current dispute between the national intelligence agency and Apple, Chertoff told the RSA computer security conference on Thursday: “Once you’ve created code that’s potentially compromising, it’s like a bacteriological weapon. You’re always afraid of it getting out of the lab”.
Chertoff explained that this is because once Apple makes the code, it would have to maintain it, due to the numerous outstanding requests for law enforcement to access other phones.
USA TODAY reports that Chertoff wasn’t the only attendee at the conference to hit out at the FBI’s request. We at AppleMagazine also know the importance of stringent smartphone encryption for keeping families safe, which is why the lead article in the new issue of our digital magazine focuses on various other safety measures built into Apple devices.
