Peter Nowak: Everybody loses in FBI versus Apple battle over iPhone encryption

The Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California. Paul Sakuma / AP Photo

With the US justice department this week abandoning a quest to force Apple to crack its iPhone encryption, the technological equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis has been averted.

Both sides can now breathe easier knowing that a courtroom showdown where state security concerns battle individual personal privacy – and one side eventually loses – is at least temporarily off the table.

It’s an unfortunate development in the larger scheme of things, because there is now the danger that the struggle between security and privacy will again move away from the public spotlight, back into the shadows. Postponing the eventual legal confrontation, meanwhile, only leaves losers in its wake.

Government loses: Prosecutors had been seeking access to the data stored on Syed Rizwan Farook's iPhone. Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik murdered 14 people in San Bernardino, California, in December, before being killed themselves in a shootout with police.

Investigators suspect Farook’s iPhone may contain leads to other possible plots or collaborators, but they had thus far been stymied by the device’s PIN code. Worried that inputting too many incorrect codes would cause the phone to self-erase its data, they asked Apple to engineer a back door.

The company refused, arguing that all iPhone users would be exposed to future malfeasance if the encryption-breaking tool ever got out, which it inevitably would.

In their statement this week, prosecutors said they had “successfully accessed the data” without Apple’s help. They also did not disclose how they had done so, although a Federal Bureau of Investigations filing last week mentioned that an unnamed outside party had demonstrated a method. Presumably, it worked.

Assuming the authorities are telling the truth, US law enforcement agencies – and potentially their partners in other countries – now have a way to break iPhone encryption, which seems like a big win for government.

After all that effort, it’s likely to be a short-term victory. The authorities may be required to disclose the new-found vulnerability to Apple thanks to a little-known “equity review” law. The rule requires that any serious technical liabilities discovered by US government agencies must be disclosed to the proper parties to prevent exposing the general public to exploitation by third parties.

Apple, which obviously has a big interest in knowing how its iPhones are getting cracked, is certain to enthusiastically push for such a review, as are consumer-advocacy organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

So despite the apparent win, any secret back door that the government has into Apple’s products probably won’t remain secret for long.

Apple loses: Speaking of Apple, the early stages of this confrontation was a public relations coup for the company. Here was the FBI unable to hack into the iPhone, and here was Apple sticking up for its customers. You can't organically engineer that kind of positive publicity.

But if the vulnerability claimed by prosecutors is indeed true, that win quickly becomes a loss. Suddenly, the iPhone isn’t as secure as everyone thought it was, and Apple is likely to spend months if not longer trying to get answers on the details of the back door.

Consumers, in the meantime, can no longer rest assured that the data on their iPhones is safe. If the FBI can break into it, surely criminals will also be able to.

Consumers lose: Caught in the middle, as usual, are those consumers who now have to go on the assumption that their mobile devices are not secure. Knowing that there's a method out there for bypassing PIN codes also does much to invalidate the usage of such features in the first place.

With Edward Snowden’s revelations a few years ago on how law-enforcement agencies in many countries are spying on their own citizens – criminal or not – consumers are now caught between the veritable rock and hard place.

They can’t necessarily trust their governments not to snoop on them, nor can they believe that technology companies can do anything to protect them.

Bad guys win: There is one group of people who don't come out of this showdown as losers – would-be criminals and terrorists.

Such bad actors now know that they can’t hide their activities and communications on their iPhones. That knowledge isn’t likely to do anything to stop them and might, at best, inconvenience them, which leads to one very important question – what was this whole battle about again?

Peter Nowak is a veteran technology writer and author of Humans 3.0: The Upgrading of the Species.

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