Chapter 3

Apple

IN DECEMBER 2015, in San Bernardino, California, a twenty-eight-year-
old health inspector and his wife attend a work holiday party. They
leave their six-month-old daughter with her grandmother. At the
party, they don ski masks and fire seventy-five rounds from two
variant AR-15 rifles. Fourteen coworkers are killed and twenty-one
seriously injured. The assailants die in a shootout with police four

hours later.^1 The FBI obtains shooter Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone 5c
and requests—and receives—a federal court order mandating Apple to
create and provide software to unlock the phone. Apple defies the

order.^2
Over the next week, I was on Bloomberg TV twice to discuss the
issue, and a strange thing happened. I started getting hate mail
regarding my view that Apple should comply with the court order. A
lot of hate mail.
Wherever you stand in the debate regarding Apple and privacy, the
more interesting question is: Would we have endured this hand-
wringing if the shooter’s phone had been a BlackBerry? No? Why?
Because the FBI-inspired court order to unlock the phone would have
had a different reception at the door of the Waterloo, Canada,
headquarters. My guess is that if the Canadian firm didn’t unlock the
phone within forty-eight hours, several dozen congressmen and
congresswomen would threaten a trade embargo.