The public relations battle over encryption and government access to protected data kicked up a notch Monday with the release of CEO Tim Cook’s letter to employees defending Apple’s refusal to help investigators hack into a terrorist’s locked iPhone.
Coming just days after FBI Director James Comey publicly chastised Apple for thwarting its investigation into the San Bernardino mass shooting, and at the same moment polls are suggesting many Americans are uneasy with Apple’s defiance, the letter underscores the brashness of the tech giant’s strategy as well as the fine line Cook is walking by refusing to help out with the highly charged investigation.
“From a marketing perspective, Cook needs to protect Apple and — not to sound like a country-western song — stand by his brand,” said Robert Passikoff, a branding expert and founder of Brand Keys, a consultancy based in New York City. “Brands stand for things, and while there was a time when Apple stood for things like interesting design, the brand has now become part of the very fabric of our modern world. And privacy is a very key part of that.
“The challenge for Cook,” he said, is to find a balance “between assuring his customers that their phones are safe from government intrusion while at the same time not sounding like he’s pro-terrorist or anti-government.”
In his early-morning email addressed to the Apple “Team,” Cook said that while “it does not feel right” to stand in the way of federal investigators, to cooperate with the FBI on opening up this one phone would threaten data security for millions and “everyone’s civil liberties.”
“We have no tolerance or sympathy for terrorists,” Cook wrote. “When they commit unspeakable acts like the tragic attacks in San Bernardino, we work to help the authorities pursue justice for the victims.”
Yet on Monday, some of those very victims’ families expressed support for the government’s moves against Apple, as a lawyer representing some of them vowed to file documents backing a U.S. magistrate’s order for Apple to play ball.
With a looming deadline of Friday to formally protest the FBI’s request in court, Apple’s high-stakes legal gambit presents a watershed moment for the accelerating debate over tech users’ digital rights. And it pits the company’s claim that it’s protecting its customers’ privacy against the government’s implication that gaining immediate access to the county-owned iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook could be a matter of life and death.
Comey said Friday in an online post that Apple owes it to the San Bernardino victims to cooperate and said the dispute wasn’t about creating legal precedent. The FBI, he wrote, “can’t look the survivors in the eye, or ourselves in the mirror, if we don’t follow this lead.”
Apple’s game plan has grown intensely controversial, with presidential candidate Donald Trump calling for a boycott of its products while Internet rights activists, technologists and computer scientists defend the iPhone maker as a champion of digital liberty now threatened by federal authorities. In a further sign of how conflicted many Americans are about the FBI-Apple battle, a Pew Research Center poll released Monday found that 51 percent of respondents felt Apple should unlock the iPhone, with only 38 percent saying it should not unlock the phone to ensure the security of its other users’ information; 11 percent offered no opinion.
Moves by both Apple and the FBI, thus far, are classic examples from the crisis-control playbook — staying on message while forcefully pushing out public statements to explain, justify and advance each side of the argument. Ira Kalb, marketing professor at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, said Apple in particular is using its bullhorn as one of the world’s most iconic companies to try to stay one step ahead of the government as the case moves through the legal system.
“Cook’s public statement is a form of marketing,” said Kalb. “Even if the government forces him to cooperate, he’s demonstrating that he’s going to fight to the very end to try and protect users’ privacy.”
In his letter and an accompanying Q&A on Apple’s website, Cook attempted to maintain an even keel, starting off with a strong condemnation of the attack and acknowledging that “it does not feel right to be on the opposite side of the government in a case centering on the freedoms and liberties that government is meant to protect.”
But later in the Q&A, Apple offered a passionate defense of its refusal to help the FBI. The danger in agreeing to “write an entirely new operating system” for the government, the document says, is that such a move would “intentionally weaken our products with a government-ordered backdoor. If we lose control of our data, we put both our privacy and our safety at risk.”
The Q&A says “hackers and cybercriminals are always looking for new ways to defeat our security, which is why we keep making it stronger.”
At the conclusion of the Q&A, Apple calls for the creation of a congressional panel of experts to “discuss the implications for law enforcement, national security, privacy and personal freedoms.”
In a way, said analyst Ben Bajarin with Creative Strategies, that conversation has already begun.
“We’re in unchartered waters right now regarding encryption,” he said. “So, philosophically, we’ll have to eventually land somewhere, and that’s what this battle is all about. It’s hard to sympathize with Apple, given this was a terrorist attack and not the government going after some rich banker’s phone. But we’ll really have to figure out where we stand with encryption.
“Eventually,” Bajarin said, “someone will make a phone that even they can’t break. And this is now the debate over whether that sort of technology should even exist down the road.”
The Associated Press also contributed to this report. Contact Patrick May at 408-920-5689; follow him at Twitter.com/patmaymerc.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT THE STANDOFF
— Apple CEO Tim Cook, defending his resistance to a federal judge’s order to create a tool to help the FBI hack into a terrorist’s iPhone
— Ira Kalb, marketing professor at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business.
— Analyst Ben Bajarin with Creative Strategies
— Robert Passikoff, branding expert and founder of Brand Keys consultancy
Source: Mercury News reporting