US President Donald Trump opened fire on Apple on Tuesday, criticizing an iPhone maker for refusing to open phones used by the defendants in security and terrorism cases, despite government assistance the company receives as a commercial facility.
Trump's criticism came in the form of tweets against the background of investigations into the shooting of three Americans by a Saudi air force officer at the US Naval Station in Pensacola, Florida last month, which Attorney General William Barr described Monday as a "terrorist act".
This episode represents the latest wave of discussion about privacy between technology companies, such as Apple and Facebook, and the authorities, and technology companies argue that strong encryption protects the privacy and security of their users, while law enforcement officials say criminals have taken advantage of this to evade justice.
Law enforcement agencies have called on tech companies to provide a way to break encryption, relying on a number of prominent issues such as last year's shooting in Pensacola and the 2015 shooting in San Bernardino, California.
Trump attacked Apple, saying, "We are helping Apple all the time in trade and many other issues, and yet it refuses to decipher the phones used by killers, drug dealers and other violent criminal elements," adding, "It must immediately stand with us and help our great country."
Apple said it could not access data encrypted with a passcode stored on an iPhone, and that it had to create a specific tool to do so, known in the technology industry as the "back door".
Even so, the company can deliver data stored on cloud storage servers to law enforcement officials, which often includes backup copies of iPhones, including iMessages.
The company declined to comment on the president's tweet, and on Monday it declined to be described by Attorney General Bill Barr as having provided no substantial assistance, after he called on her to help the FBI open two iPhone devices involved in the Pensacola case, and the company said it had responded to seven separate legal requests From federal investigators in December, starting on the day of the shooting.
The American Civil Liberties Union described Trump's demand as "dangerous and unconstitutional," and said it would weaken the security of millions of iPhones.
"Simply, there is no way for Apple or any other company to provide the FBI with access to encrypted communications without also providing them to authoritarian foreign governments and weaken our defenses against criminals and infiltrators," he said in a statement.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that the devices used by the shooter in Florida were iPhone 5 and iPhone 7. The newspaper, citing experts in cyber security, said that security companies can access them without the need for Apple's help
