Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
![](https://unherd.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-21-at-15.09.25-96x96.jpg)
It was an outrage many will remember. On December 2, 2015, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik burst into a Christmas party held by their employers in San Bernardino, California. Pledging support for ISIS, they began shooting immediately, leaving 14 people dead and injuring two dozen others.
It was the deadliest mass shooting in the US for years, yet neither Farook nor Malik had criminal records, and neither were on any terrorist watch list. In the months that followed, the FBI began to grapple with what they saw to be a troubling new phenomenon: online self-radicalisation. Painstakingly building a portrait of Farook and Malik’s life, they tried to learn why both had decided to die for a terrorist group neither had actually met. And to do that, Farook’s Apple iPhone became central to the search. The FBI asked Apple to unlock it, and Apple refused. A court order compelled Apple to open the phone, but again they said they’d legally fight it.
There was nothing unusual about this conflict. The FBI’s overwhelming mandate was to learn as much as they could about Farook to protect public safety. Apple’s, especially in the wake of the Snowden disclosures, was to assure their users that their data was secure – even those who turned out to be terrorists. And both sides saw the argument as far bigger than this single case. Both knew that it would set a new precedent for how security should be balanced against privacy; and both knew that the world was watching, with almost exactly half of the public supporting each position.
The debate was old; what was new was the way it was resolved. Just months before the attack, Apple had released an operating system that meant that Apple itself could not decrypt the device. Technology, in other words, that deliberately made its maker unable to comply with the court order they now faced, or any of the others they anticipated would emerge in the years ahead. The court then ruled that Apple had to write new software to crack the phone, but as Apple prepared to fight that case too, the FBI promptly withdrew the claim. Before the legal process could be concluded or enforced, the FBI had paid professional hackers to find an undisclosed flaw in the software, and broken it open themselves.
For both Apple and the FBI, the battle in the courts had been a sideshow. That delicate, constantly changing trade-off of between privacy and security wasn’t decided by the finer principles of law, courtly argument and judicial interpretation. The decider was the technology itself. Apple had built technology to make the court order impossible. And the FBI had bought technology to mean they didn’t need Apple to carry it out.
The dispute was about something bigger than this single case. It showed that how the tensions, trade-offs and conflicts that we’ve always had are being resolved in an entirely new way.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe