Keep making noise "no" of Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), to the FBI's request to provide the technology necessary to force open the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino killers. To the chorus of voices that have risen in the last few hours has also been added that of the CEO of Google Sundar Pichai, who echoed the words of Cupertino CEO Tim Cook, quoting them almost literally.
Pichai, in fact, defined the request of the American authorities as “a worrying precedent”, where Cook had spoken of a “dangerous precedent”. The position of the co-founder of Whatsapp Jan Koum: "We must not allow this dangerous precedent to be set: today our freedom and our autonomy are at stake".
A request, therefore, that of the FBI, which ends up uniting three of the big giants of Silicon Valley, united in fear of a new NSA gate effect, the possibility that, faced with a new invasion of system privacy, some foreign governments may decide to nationalize their network, eroding large slices of their market.
After all, behind Tim Cook's no, more than ethical reasons, there are above all reasons practical and technical reasons. Because the one-off solution requested by the US authorities quite simply does not exist.
The encryption system introduced by Apple in 2014, in fact, would be impenetrable even for Apple itself. The only solution would be to create a parallel software to sabotage the security mechanisms of Cupertino, so just that backdoor cuts, that back door to accessing the data contained in all Apple devices, which the FBI and its entourage say they don't want.
"It's as if in the physical world they asked me to produce the equivalent of a key capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks," explained Tim Cook to give an idea of the kind of intervention that should be performed. Creating a passe-partout for all Apple devices it seems like a risk that Cupertino can't afford to take.
