Here's the latest news regarding the court case between the FBI and Apple. Apparently, a large number of companies from across the Globe have rallied behind Apple to support them in their defense of product encryption. In fact, a very large array of tech companies have numerous amicus briefs as official support of Apple's stance on this important issue.
A few of the court filings were created by a joint team of several different tech companies. One of the amicus briefs included a joint filing by Amazon, Box, Cisco, Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nest, Pinterest, Slack, Snapchat, WhatsApp, and Yahoo. Another included the likes of Airbnb, Atlassian, Automattic, CloudFlare, eBay, GitHub, Kickstarter, LinkedIn, Mapbox, Medium, Meetup, Reddit, Square, Squarespace, Twilio, Twitter and Wickr.
AT&T even filed their own individual court document in support of Apple. The giant swath of court filings in support of Apple's fight didn't just come from tech companies though. There is also a compilation filing from 32 Law Professors, several different civil liberties groups, and quite a few more that are too numerous to list.
Of course, Apple wants to show the solidarity, so they did list them all. You can find the entire list with appropriate links here: Apple Amicus Briefs in Support of Apple.
One of the notable quotes from the various court filings said, "“It would set a dangerous precedent, creating a world in which the government could simply force companies to create, design, and redesign their systems to allow law enforcement access to data, instead of requiring the government to use the measures, and meet the requirements, of legislatively enacted statutory schemes.”
Another said, "The government is not just asking companies to do what they do in the normal course of business; the government is asking companies to change how they do business."
If you didn't realize it before this, it has become obvious that this is a very big deal. We are seeing history in the making folks.
I know I'm not ready to give up anymore of what little privacy I have left just so law enforcement can have access to everyones emails, text messages anytime they want. Crime isn't suddenly going to skyrocket now that criminals know Apple isn't going to give law enforcement free reign to their customers private information. They got along just fine before this issue, I'm sure they'll figure out how to spy on people long after this has gone away.
