What If It Wasn't An iPhone? What The Apple/FBI Case Means For The Industry

(Click here for our comprehensive explainer on what's going on. A quick recap: The FBI is asking Apple to lift security restrictions that prevent investigators from trying unlimited PIN codes to crack into the phone. Apple says that would mean writing a whole new operating system that would then be in danger of being tweaked to crack into other phones, via other government requests or by hackers.)

Apple's position is really unique for this fight. On the PR front, it's a massive and popular consumer brand. But it's also one of few companies that design their own software and hardware, including chips, which has paved the way for the extra-strength encryption that the investigators are facing in this case. For instance, Apple built the iPhone in such a way that it only accepts software signed with Apple's own encryption key.

Apple's main competitors, Google and Microsoft, both have different levels of encryption implemented on mobile devices.

With the exception of the Nexus phone, Google's Android operating system is run on other companies' devices, like Samsung's or Motorola's. That has created a very fractured universe of Android devices, some of which receive regular security updates and others that don't. And Google's rollout of encryption by default in recent years has been impaired by the partners' resistance to installing special chips to handle encryption without slowing down the phone, says Chris Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Microsoft, too, has started to adopt encryption by default in recent years, but it has faced heat from the tech community for potentially keeping backups of encryption keys that could unlock your encrypted device.

Soghoian suggests, in fact, that had this investigation involved a mobile device that wasn't an iPhone, getting inside it would be a far easier task and may not require the involvement of the software maker itself. Though he also doesn't discount the possibility that the National Security Agency probably couldcrack into the iPhone, too, but that's not what this case is about.

"This is in many ways more about legal strategy than what's actually on the phone," Soghoian says.

"We must not allow this dangerous precedent to be set. Today our freedom and our liberty is at stake," Jan Koum, CEO of encrypted messaging app WhatsApp, has written in a Facebook post. (Facebook owns WhatsApp.)

Google CEO Sundar Pichai, too, posted on Twitter that he was aware of the challenges that law enforcement agencies face in protecting the public and companies cooperate based on valid legal orders, but "that's wholly different than requiring companies to enable hacking of customer devices & data. Could be a troubling precedent."

Microsoft's executives haven't issued statements of their own, but shared a comment posted by the Reform Government Surveillance coalition (AOL, Apple, Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo): - More at the PRIVACY & SECURITY

What If It Weren't An iPhone? What The Apple/FBI Case Means For The Industry

Apple, The FBI And iPhone Encryption: A Look At What's At Stake