One year later, September 2014, Cook took the stage in Cupertino to debut the new iPhone 6, “the biggest advancement in iPhone history,” the phone for the post-Snowden era. From now on, Apple automatically encrypted everything on the phone—messages, call logs, photos, contacts—using a complex mathematical algorithm that used the user’s own unique passcode to unwrap a larger key on the device. Apple no longer held the spare keys to customer data. They’d given the only pair to the users. If governments wanted access to their data, they were going to have to ask the customers directly.
