Stephen L. Carter, Columnist

Apple Still Won't Help the FBI Break Into iPhones. Good.

The feds shouldn’t be able to just waltz right into your phone.

May 22, 2020 at 12:00 PM UTC

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of law at Yale University and author of “Invisible: The Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.”

What you do on them is your business.
Photographer: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

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There are two important lessons in this week’s announcement that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has finally succeeded in cracking two mobile phones belonging to Mohammed Alshamrani, the aviation student who killed three people last December at a naval base in Pensacola, Florida.

The first lesson is that cracking an encrypted device takes time and effort even when the federal government brings all its resources to bear. The second is that Apple still refuses to build tools to make hacking its mobile devices easier.