What's Apple vs FBI battle really about?

San Bernardino attack Dec, 2015

On December 2, 2015, 14 people were killed and 22 were seriously injured in a terrorist attack at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California, which consisted of a mass shooting and an attempted bombing. The committers, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, a married couple living in the city of Redlands, targeted a San Bernardino County Department of Public Health training event and holiday party, of about 80 employees, in a rented banquet room. After the shooting, the couple fled in a rented SUV. Four hours later, police pursued their vehicle and killed them in a shootout.

Investigation

The FBI discovered Farook’s government-issued iPhone 5c on Dec. 3 during a lawful search. Since the iPhone 5c was locked when investigators seized it, the logical next step was to obtain access to iCloud backups for the phone in order to obtain evidence related to the investigation in the days following the attack.

Problem

Apple was able to give the FBI backups only through October 19, when Farook apparently stopped backing up the phone. That leaves a one-and-a-half month gap in the data between October 19 and December 2, when the massacre occurred. The FBI believes Farook might have intentionally stopped the automatic backups to hide something. The phone is locked with a passcode. The FBI doesn't have the code, and neither does Apple. The passcode is stored only on the device itself.  iPhones running 2014's iOS8 software or the newer iOS9 protect their data using 256-bit AES encryption.  Because of Apple's built-in security, you can only have 10 tries to enter a passcode. After that, the iPhone wipes itself that is, removes all the data stored on the device.

Even if the FBI could disable the auto-wipe function, breaking the passcode could take a long time -- a very long time. The iPhone requires a minimum delay of 80 milliseconds between each passcode entry, and wrong entries can extend the delay by minutes at a time. Assuming Farook used a six-digit passcode, Apple estimates it could take 5.5 years to guess.

Apple did help law enforcement officials in the past by allowing them to bypass the lockscreen as long as there was a valid subpoena or a search warrant. It had data extraction technology that let the company's engineers bypass a user's passcode and pull information like contacts, calls and messages. And it did so without having to unlock the phone.

But the release of iOS 8 in 2014 changed that. The new software came encrypted by default, which means Apple no longer had the ability to extract data because the files to be extracted are protected by an encryption key that is tied to the user's passcode, which Apple does not possess.

Court order

On 16 February, U.S. Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym ordered Apple to write and digitally sign software called a "Software Image File," that would make it easier for the US government to guess the 4-digit passcode on Farook’s device. The court order asks Apple to create a new, custom version of iOS that runs only on this specific iPhone and that makes three changes to the software. The first two changes would bypass or disable the auto-wipe function and the delay that limits how quickly new passcodes can be entered. The court also asks Apple to add a way to attach a cable or wirelessly connect to the iPhone so the FBI can automatically enter passcodes. That way, the FBI can use a supercomputer to bombard the phone with passcode guesses until it finds the right one.

Apple said

Apple's CEO Tim Cook said that Apple can't just bypass those protections for a single phone and expect other phones to stay safe and secure. Apple believes that if they made a "master key" for the iPhone, it would be an irresistible prize for hackers, and that its own servers would inevitably be hacked. Apple also worries that employees inside law enforcement, or inside Apple itself, could steal the technology.

The U.S. attorney's office replied, in turn, with a motion to compel Apple's compliance with the order. The government said it was not asking Apple to create a “master key” but to create software that opened this particular iPhone. Apple could maintain custody of the software, the government motion said, and destroy it after the phone was unlocked. “It does not mean the end of privacy,” the motion said.

Now

Apple had five business days from February 16 to challenge the court's order, but it asked for a three-day extension. Now it has until February 26 to file. Magistrate Pym has scheduled a hearing for March 22 in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in Riverside. As you'd expect, there will be a lot of legal back and forth, and the case could go through the federal court system all the way up to the US Supreme Court. It's up to Apple and the government to decide how far to take thing, but Apple said it will pursue the case as far as it needs to go, because it's not backing down.

NOTE:

Terrorist have no Religion.Because No religion support terrorism at all.We should not look at blind followers, we should look into Religious Scriptures before judging .