For the last couple weeks, the FBI and Apple have been having a legal fight over the iPhone of the San Bernidino shooter, Sayan Farook who on December 2, 2015, killed 14 people in a terrorist attack. The FBI needs it unlocked so they can see what is inside, and they want Apple to unlock the phone, all under the All Writs Act.
Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said, “If the government can use the All Writs Act to make it easier to unlock your iPhone, it would have the power to reach into anyone’s device to capture their data.”
The All Writs Act made by the Judiciary Act of 1789, made 227 years ago, says, “The Supreme Court and all courts established by Act of Congress may issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.” This basically makes it okay for a court to issue a formal order, or a “writ,” making people do things, as long as it is for legal and nessicary reasons. Apple was fighting the order with a feature of the All Writs Act where one can’t be compelled to do what the government asks if it is an “unreasonable burden.”
The court ruling was going to decide the future of 21st Century servalence, but then the FBI dropped the case and said they got the phone open from a third party, and the FBI classified the technique so they can use it in the future. This might be dangerous; if the FBI got into the phone through an operating system  flaw, then every other iPhone is now at risk to be hacked. Since the FBI classified the technique and won’t tell Apple how they got into Farook’s iPhone, Apple won’t be able to fix the flaw and keep the roughly 682 million people using iPhones and Apple products worldwide secure. The war between privacy and national security is a big issue, and even  President Barack Obama weighed in on it.
He said, ”What makes it even more complicated is the fact that we also want really strong encryption because part of us preventing terrorism or preventing people from disrupting the financial system or our air traffic control system or a whole other set of systems that are increasingly digitalized, is that hackers, state or non-state, can’t get in there and mess around.”
But the FBI already found a way to get around and bypass the security system in the iPhone and they have already set up other iPhones to unlock with their new method of cracking Apple security, and if the FBI doesn’t tell Apple how they cracked the iPhone and they remain negligent to the possible dangers of being careless with the security of the millions of Americans who use iPhones.