patrick.net

ON A COLD AND WET FEBRUARY EVENING in New York City a few years ago, I was in Midtown running some errands, when I came upon what appeared to be a protest outside the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue. There were about six, maybe eight people penned inside a crowd control barricade, holding up signs of some sort. They were surrounded by reporters. From a distance, I thought they might be picketing one of Apple’s many corporate misdeeds: maybe they were outraged over the company’s flagrant tax evasion or brutal labor practices, or they might be union representatives trying to organize the company’s disgruntled salesforce.

But on closer inspection, I realized that this wasn’t a protest against Apple but a rally of ardent supporters praising the company’s product line. One of the participants held up a large red poster featuring a giant iPhone and a bold slogan: “SECURE PHONES SAVE LIVES.”

It turned out that most of the placards had the message; a few of the demonstrators were giving interviews, shouting against the crushing noise of rush hour traffic. I caught a few snatches of the conversation. “Now we are going to create a new class of victim,” yelled one demonstrator to a camera crew huddled under plastic anti-rain covers. “A billion people!” I pressed closer, but could only make out a few disconnected words—something about backdoors, keys, and cryptography.

Backdoors? Victims? iPhones saving lives? What did I just stumble on? Some sort of high-concept political performance art? They couldn’t be serious. But then I realized: this was one of those flash mob rallies that I had been hearing so much about on the internet—organized in support of Apple’s fight against the Federal Bureau of Investigation. These people were indeed serious about iPhones saving lives—all too serious.

Weirdly enough, this pro-Apple rally was prompted by a crime committed on the other side of the country. Nearly three months earlier, in December 2015, a Southern California couple who’d met online and bonded over shared dreams of jihad packed their SUV with machine guns, pistols, and rifles and mounted a terror raid on a nondescript nonprofit social service agency in the desert town of San Bernardino. It was a gruesome crime. The pair killed fourteen and wounded twenty-two before being gunned down themselves. The FBI, worried that the couple had been working with others, wanted Apple to unlock an iPhone belonging to one of the shooters. Apple had the ability to unlock the phone, but it refused—on principle. Apple CEO Tim Cook decided to turn this minor confrontation with authority into a major public relations spectacle—a high stakes drama in which Apple played the hero and defender of the people, throwing its sleek (designed in California, assembled in China) corporate body upon the wheels and gears of America’s odious government surveillance machine. In a letter to Apple customers, Cook claimed that providing even one-time access to the FBI in what was clearly a legitimate criminal investigation would forever endanger iPhone and cloud users around the world. Silicon Valley and big business—including Google, Facebook, Amazon, AT&T, eBay, and Intel—sided with Apple and backed it in court against the Department of Justice.