Discreetly, Cook took that argument to Obama himself—in quiet sessions in Washington and Silicon Valley. American spy agencies and police had all kinds of other options, he argued. They could find data in the cloud. They could use Facebook to figure out anyone’s acquaintances. But to give them access to that data inside the phone was to undercut an American expectation of privacy—and to invite the Chinese and others to do the same, for far more nefarious purposes. “The only way I can protect hundreds of millions of people is the way I’m doing it,” Cook told me during one of his Washington
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