Apple’s Tim Cook Continues Fight Against Backdoor Access And Weakened Encryption

Apple CEO Tim Cook has been known to regularly criticise the government for its stand on opening backdoors for the government on its encryption systems. Now Cook has went further on to challenge the US government to have a "no backdoors" policy towards their approach on encryption technology.

Cook has vocalised this statement at a recent meeting between the US government officials and technology companies, which included his company Apple and other companies like Cloudflare, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft and Twitter.

According to a report, Coo even lashed out on some officials regarding the suggestion that the encryption technology that the tech companies like Apple uses should have backdoors built in to combat the use of encrypted communications on terrorism. Cook went on to call the government into denying the repeated requests of FBI director James Comey to have special access for law enforcement into the company's platforms.

At one point during that time, a heated exchange happened between the big boss of Apple and US attorney general Loretta Lynch, who has responded to Cook's statements about the need of balance between privacy and national security.

Despite the pressure being heaped upon tech companies to sacrifice encryption for the sake of public safety, the Apple boss has been standing firm in his opposition on the issue of allowing backdoor access to the government into their service platforms.

The fight between the US officials and the Apple CEO is not new. It could be recalled that early last year in February, Cook has warned the White House of dire consequences if the right to privacy is sacrificed. Later on in June, the Apple executive has defended strong encryption technology during his speech in Washington.

According to his speech, some people in Washington are hoping to undermine the ability of citizens to encrypt their data, which is dangerous. He describes the backdoor access as a key placed under a mat for cops or a burglar to find it easily. Cook went on to say that today, criminals will use every technology tool they can have their hands on to hack into people's account.

Once they know there is a key hidden somewhere (which is the backdoor access), they will work on it nonstop until they find it. So removing the encryption tool from their products, as what some officials in Washington are pushing for, will only hurt the law-abiding citizens who rely on them to protect their data.

It could be recalled that during the late 2015 Paris attacks, Apple has teamed up with different tech companies such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Twitter and 56 other technology companies to reject the calls for a weakened encryption technology.