Apple and the FBI are not friends at the moment. The two are battling in court with a case that revives the never-ending privacy vs. national security matters.
As the war continues, Apple seems to be planning to make life for the FBI and other law enforcing agencies even more difficult by hiring another top expert in encryption-related matters.
Cupertino has offered an internship to a developer behind one of the most encrypted messaging apps – Signal. Frederic Jacobs, the man behind the app that rolls secure messages and encrypted calls into one package, revealed this news on his Twitter account, @FredericJacobs on Thursday, February 25.
This Signal messaging app is in fact kept afloat by grants and donations. The app is also available for free on both iOS and Android, but it offers no ads despite being free. Despite announcing that he will be joining the CoreOS security team at Cupertino this summer, there is no word of what exactly Jacobs will be doing on the team. However, with a man of his expertise, we expect him to play a huge role in the development of iOS 10’s security aspects. iPhone 7 is expected to be unveiled somewhere in September and if all goes well, this device will run on iOS 10.
Apple is still fighting the FBI in courts
While this high profile hiring is going on, Apple is still in court, battling a case that pits privacy against national security. The court ordered Apple to help the FBI by creating a new OS that can thwart the current encryption as the FBI seeks more information from a phone linked to one of the killers at last year’s San Bernardino, California terror attack.
On Thursday, Apple urged the court to reverse the order, terming the request as handing the government “dangerous power” and putting the users of iPhones at risk. According to the iPhone maker, this will just be the start of many other similar requests from the government, despite the agency’s specifics of “Just this once” and for “Just this phone.” The lawyers of the company even further went ahead to term the court request as unconstitutional.
Earlier this week, reports surfaced that Apple had begun works on new security measures aimed at making it even harder for the government and other third parties to break into locked iPhones. In addition, it going to get even tougher as far as encryption for iCloud backups is concerned. Now that Frederic Jacobs has made it official that he will be part of Apple’s security team this summer, it seems Apple is planning even bigger and tougher security and privacy measures for the upcoming iPhone 7.
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