Steve Wozniak on Apple vs. FBI: I'm with Apple on this one
Even though he's not working there anymore, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak always has an opinion on all things Apple, and he doesn't shy from saying it in public.
On Monday, Woz was a guest on Conan, where he shared his thoughts on Apple's firm denial to help the FBI install a backdoor into an iPhone that once belonged to one of the terrorists behind the San Bernardino terrorist attack.
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"I side with Apple on this one," Wozniak said, pointing out he's a known human rights advocate and is one of the founders of non-profit digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
According to Wozniak, the FBI picked a "lame case" to prove that adding a backdoor to the iPhone is important for national security.
"The two phones owned by the people that aren't even convicted terrorists didn't have one link to a terrorist organization (...) so they wanna take this other phone, that they, the two didn't destroy, that was a work phone...that's so lame and worthless to expect something's on it," he told Conan O'Brien.
Wozniak also raised a point similar to the one Tim Cook did in his open letter to users in February: Once a way to bypass the encryption of an iPhone is revealed, the same technique can be used over and over again in the future.
"What if China says: Apple, you've got to give us a backdoor so we can get into any phone, even your government's officials' iPhones, and inspect them at any time. That's wrong," Wozniak concludes.
What if China says: Apple, you've got to give us a backdoor so we can get into any phone?
The legal battle between the FBI and Apple has caused a heated public debate in the past few weeks, with several prominent tech figures, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, siding with Apple. But while Apple enjoys a wide support among IT industry heavyweights, some politicians and the majority of Americans (according to some polls) think the company should yield to FBI's request.
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Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
