The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age

by David E. Sanger

From the other coast, Tim Cook had an answer: the apartment keys and trunk keys belonged to the owner of the apartment and the car, not to the manufacturer of their locks. “It’s our job to provide you with the tools to lock up your stuff,” Cook said. At Apple and Google, company executives told me that Washington had brought these changes on themselves. Because the NSA had failed to police their own insiders, the world was demanding that Apple prove their data was secure, and it was up to Apple to do so. Naturally the government saw this as a deliberate dodge. And to some extent it was. But Cook had a bigger and better argument, one that the government could not so easily parry: if Apple created a back door into its code, that vulnerability would become the target of every hacker on Earth. The FBI was naïve to think that if the tech companies created a lock and gave the FBI a key, no one else would figure out how to pick it. “The problem is,” Cook said, “anyone with any technical skills knows that if you create an opening for the FBI, you create one for China and Russia and everyone else.”