Recently, the federal government has been trying to put away 13 druglords for good for their crimes with leading very large drug operations. However, while they have many of them pinned with hardpressed evidence, several of them are still in trial. One of these men is Jun Feng.
As of iOS 8, all iPhones have been encrytped securely, so that if the passcode cannot be figured out, NO ONE can have access to the data, as the passcode is the only way to decrypt the data on the device, and too many guesses will-yup, you guessed it. Lock the device permanently.
However, Jun Feng's iPhone is running old software, iOS 7, so the device is not encrypted. What this means is that Apple, the manufacturer, has a second way, a "backdoor", to get inside his device. The feds have reportedly intercepted a signal before it reached the phone that attempted to use Apple's iCloud features to remotely wipe all the data, so the feds have reason to believe the device has critical evidence to not only take down Feng, but maybe even escalade and compromise more members of this drug case. However, to get this evidence, they have pressured Apple to hack the device. While Apple has helped feds in the past, this time, they are standing firm that although it is a criminal case, user data should remain protected. This debate is a hard choice to make for Apple, as a lot of pressure from security-concerned public, but also the government, is involved. Users want to be sure that the company they buy from WON'T give over their data if pressured from the government, because then the world might have no privacy. That is why I believe encryption is most valuable. It takes pressure off both Apple and the users. Data cannot be compromised by any parties, whether through court orders or hackers, and cases such as this one would not exist, if everyones' devices were protected with encryption.
-330 words
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