Justice Department Drops Lawsuit Against Apple as FBI has now Unlocked Farook’s iPhone (TechCrunch): Apple’s magnificent marketing campaign, which was playing out in the court of public opinion along with its case in the Central District of California may have backfired, according to this article. The court filing, which is included here, says rather succinctly “The government has now successfully accessed the data stored on Farook’s iPhone and therefore no longer requires the assistance of Apple Inc. .” The full article is here.
[Editor’s Opinion]
I may not have an MBA from Harvard, but from my time at Northeastern, I seem to recall that a key element of any marketing strategy is to provide messaging that actually supports your product’s abilities in the short term and will lead to increased sales in the mid to long term. Here, Apple CEO, Tim Cook chose to spend a few weeks fighting the government’s request to assist the DOJ by creating a specific iOS update that could be installed on a specific iPhone 5c that would allow the DOJ to employ brute-force hacking methods to unlock the phone and access the data therein. Had Cook merely acquiesced and used his marketing machine to explain that Apple would assist the DOJ by creating a special iOS version that could be uploaded on this specific iPhone 5c phone to allow the DOJ to bypass the timeout features, as well as the data-erase functions, they may have managed to maintain the illusion that their hardware and software is “unbreakable.” However, Apple’s CEO chose a different strategy and decried this government intrusion on privacy rights grounds and even extended the argument to suggest that requesting that Apple developers spend two weeks writing this code was a free speech infringement since code is speech and ergo forcing someone to write specific code is analogous to forcing someone to say something. That position is very bizarre and seemingly non-sensical although Apple and its extensive legal staff decided to push this narrative during their media offensive against the big, bad government.
Now Apple will need to figure out how to spin the narrative that no, they would not comply with the DOJ order unless they were forced to do so in order to uphold the privacy rights of everyone in the world. Meanwhile, a company (rumored to be Israeli tech company Cellebrite) rolled in, accepted the challenge and now can presumably unlock not just the single iPhone in question, but any iPhone5 running this same iOS version. This seems to be a larger privacy issue than Apple creating a specific iOS version that would only update a specific iPhone 5c. So I guess that privacy advocates and those who were hoping to pick up cheap iPhone 5c’s in order to lurk in the shadows may want to rethink those purchases now that these are seemingly ripe for the picking.
Apple took a gamble and tried to rally the world with them to stand against oppression and government intrusion on privacy. Now, the government has the lawful access to this iPhone that they sought following their valid court order and now Apple is left trying to explain exactly how secure their iOS software and Apple hardware truly is (or isn’t) as the case may be. I suppose if Apple had unveiled a new iPhone that was incapable of being broken in this manner then one could view this marketing strategy as a long game; however given the fact that none of the current marketing literature seems to say that, this seems more like a marketing fail.
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