In the end, the Apple-FBI dispute was solved when the FBI cracked Apple’s security—without assistance. This is great for the FBI, but terrible for Apple, which now has, as the New York Times reports, an image problem. “Apple is a business, and it has to earn the trust of its customers,” says one security company executive in the Times. “It needs to be perceived as having something that can fix this vulnerability as soon as possible.”
In taking on the FBI in the San Bernardino case, Apple, it seems, had hoped to create the perception of an absolute commitment to security. Creating an iPhone that not even the state could crack was important to Apple’s image in a post-Snowden era. No doubt Apple must have marketing data that suggests as much.
But now, everybody knows Apple’s “security" can be breached, with or without the help of Apple's engineers. If the FBI had deliberately picked a public fight with Apple (which nothing suggests they did), it could hardly have orchestrated a better response to Apple's refusal to cooperate with the San Bernardino investigation: The FBI got what it wanted while undermining the very claim on which Apple staked its case in the court of public opinion, leaving Apple frantically trying to figure out how they did it.
Of course, as the security executive says, Apple is a business. Still, in an age of complaints about corporate profits taking precedence over the needs of civic life, I continue to be mystified by Apple’s stance, which—whatever the company’s claims—makes sense only as a strategy to maintain or further maximize its profits. In this case, Apple has shown little regard for that which the relative security of a society actually depends: legitimate forensic work, due process, and the state’s (yes, the state’s, which, unlike corporations or private security firms, is publicly accountable) capacity to gauge future threats and reasonably intervene within the confines of the law. Yet “security” is to Apple a marketing problem, not a civic problem.
As I stated in my earlier, longer, and admittedly more thoughtful post about this matter, I think that Apple could have cooperated in this particular case, as they had done in past cases, with relatively little harm to the company’s reputation and with real forensic good being done. Of course, cooperation would have meant that the only wall between your iPhone and the FBI would have been the law itself, but isn’t that the whole point of liberal societies? Lex Rex—law over all, including the FBI, and including Apple’s image.