How Tim Cook, in iPhone Battle, Became a Bulwark for Digital Privacy
By KATIE BENNER and NICOLE PERLROTH

SAN FRANCISCO — Letters from around the globe began pouring into the inbox of Timothy D. Cook not long after the publication of the first revelations from Edward J. Snowden about mass government surveillance.

Do you know how much privacy means to us? they asked Apple’s chief executive. Do you understand?

Mr. Cook did. He was proud that Apple sold physical products — phones, tablets and laptops — and did not traffic in the intimate, digital details of its customers’ lives.

That stance crystallized on Tuesday when Mr. Cook huddled for hours with lawyers and others at Apple’s headquarters to figure out how to respond to a federal court order requiring the company to let the United States government break into the iPhone of one of the gunmen in a San Bernardino, Calif., mass shooting. Late Tuesday, Mr. Cook took the fight public with a letter to customers that he personally signed.

“We feel we must speak up in the face of what we see as an overreach by the U.S. government,” wrote Mr. Cook, 55. “Ultimately, we fear that this demand would undermine the very freedoms and liberty our government is meant to protect.”

Mr. Cook’s standoff with law enforcement officials is indicative of his personal evolution from a behind-the-scenes operator at Apple to one of the world’s most outspoken corporate executives. During that time, he has moved a once secretive Silicon Valley company into the center of highly charged social and legal issues. While Mr. Cook’s predecessor, Apple co-founder Steven P. Jobs, was considered a business icon, he never took aggressive positions on such matters as Mr. Cook now has.

Being at loggerheads with the United States government is risky for Apple and may draw a torrent of public criticism of the world’s most valuable company at a time when its growth rate has significantly decelerated.

Yet people who know Mr. Cook said he did not believe he had a choice but to be vocal. Mr. Cook, who became Apple’s chief executive in 2011, has long said that businesses and their leaders should think of themselves as important members of civic society. In September, he emphasized that this responsibility “has grown markedly in the last couple of decades or so as government has found it more difficult to move forward.”

Mr. Cook “says what he believes, especially in difficult situations,” said Don Logan, the former chairman of Time Warner Cable who has been friends with Mr. Cook since he became chief executive of Apple, bonding over their shared alma mater, Auburn University. Of Mr. Cook’s opposition to the court order, Mr. Logan said: “Tim is currently dealing with a very difficult situation and he knows the decision he has made has lots of ramifications, good or bad. But he wants to do the right thing.”

Apple declined to make Mr. Cook available for an interview. The company is preparing to file an opposition brief against the court order.

Mr. Cook’s ideas about civic duty were partly formed during his childhood in rural Alabama. In a speech at the United Nations in 2013, he recounted how Ku Klux Klansmen had once burned a cross on the lawn of a black family’s home and how he yelled for them to stop. “This image was permanently imprinted in my brain, and it would change my life forever,” he said.

At Apple, which he joined as a senior executive in 1998, Mr. Cook was a quiet figure for much of the period when he worked for Mr. Jobs, a showman who prized secrecy at the company. After Mr. Jobs stepped down because of ailing health, Mr. Cook began making Apple more open, publishing an annual report on suppliers and working conditions for more than a million factory workers.

In 2014, Mr. Cook revealed he was gay, a move widely seen as making a statement about gay rights. Last year, he wrote an editorial decrying religious freedom laws that had been proposed in more than two dozen states that would let people skirt anti-discrimination laws that conflicted with their religious beliefs.

His outspokenness has drawn criticism, with some investors questioning how nonbusiness initiatives — including some of Apple’s environmental moves — would contribute to the company’s bottom line. Mr. Cook responded at a shareholder meeting that it is important for Apple to do things “because they’re just and right.”

Privacy has long been a priority for Mr. Cook. At a tech conference in 2010, he said Apple “has always had a very different view of privacy than some of our colleagues in the Valley.” He cited the iPhone’s feature that shows where a phone — and presumably its user — is and said fears about abuse and stalking had compelled the company to let consumers decide whether or not their apps could use their location data.

Mr. Cook’s views on privacy hardened over time as customers globally began entrusting more personal data to Apple’s iPhones. At the same time, Apple was growing tired of requests from government officials worldwide asking the company to unlock smartphones.

Each data-extraction request was carefully vetted by Apple’s lawyers. Of those deemed legitimate, Apple in recent years required that law enforcement officials physically travel with the gadget to the company’s headquarters, where a trusted Apple engineer would work on the phones inside Faraday bags, which block wireless signals, during the process of data extraction.

Processing these requests was extremely tedious. More worrisome, the data stored on its customers iPhones was growing more personal, including photos, messages and bank, health and travel data.

And some government officials were not exactly instilling confidence in Apple’s engineers. In one case, after law enforcement officials rushed a phone to Apple’s headquarters for data extraction, the engineers discovered their target had not enabled the device’s passcode feature.

So Mr. Cook and other Apple executives resolved not only to lock up customer data, but to do so in a way that would put the keys squarely in the hands of the customer, not the company. By the time Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system, iOS7, in September 2013, the company was encrypting all third-party data stored on customers’ phones by default.

“People have a basic right to privacy,” Mr. Cook has said.

By then, Mr. Snowden’s disclosures about how the National Security Agency had cozied up to some tech companies and hacked others to gain user data were reverberating worldwide. The disclosures included revelations of a comprehensive, decade-long Central Intelligence Agency program to compromise Apple’s products; C.I.A. analysts tampered with the products so the government could collect app makers’ data. In other cases, the agency was embedding spy tools in Apple’s hardware, and even modifying an Apple software update that allowed government analysts to record every keystroke.

Letters from alarmed Apple customers started flooding into Mr. Cook’s inbox, fortifying his stance on privacy. Apple’s eighth mobile operating system, iOS8, which rolled out in September 2014, made it basically impossible for the company’s engineers to extract any data from mobile phones and tablets.

For officials at the world’s law enforcement agencies, the new software was a clear signal that Apple was growing defiant. A month after iOS8’s release, James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., told an audience at the Brookings Institution that Apple had gone “too far” with the expanded encryption, arguing that the operating system effectively sealed off any chance of tracking kidnappers, terrorists and criminals.

Government agencies began to press Apple and other tech companies for so-called back doors that could bypass strong security measures. With tensions rising, some form of technical compromise — whether in the form of a chip, a back door or a key — was off the table by 2015.

At Apple, Mr. Cook and others continued to work with investigators to the extent the company could and complied with court orders. Last October, a federal judge in New York said the government was overstepping its boundaries by using a centuries-old law, the All Writs Act, as the basis for its request that Apple open an iPhone for a drug investigation. Apple’s lawyer sided with the judge in the case. The matter has not been resolved.

After December’s San Bernardino attack, Apple worked with the F.B.I. to gather data that had been backed up to the cloud from a work iPhone issued to one of the assailants, according to court filings. When investigators also wanted unspecified information on the phone that had not been backed up, the judge this week granted the order requiring Apple to create a special tool to help investigators more easily crack the phone’s passcode and get into the device.

Apple had asked the F.B.I. to issue its application for the tool under seal. But the government made it public, prompting Mr. Cook to go into bunker mode to draft a response, according to people privy to the discussions, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The result was the letter that Mr. Cook signed on Tuesday, where he argued that it set a “dangerous precedent” for a company to be forced to build tools for the government that weaken security.

“Compromising the security of our personal information can ultimately put our personal safety at risk,” he wrote. “That is why encryption has become so important to all of us.”

Far from backing down from the fight, Mr. Cook has told colleagues that he still stands by the company’s longstanding plans to encrypt everything stored on Apple’s myriad devices, services and in the cloud, where the bulk of data is still stored unencrypted.

“If you place any value on civil liberties, you don’t do what law enforcement is asking,” Mr. Cook has said.

庫克捍衛公民自由 槓上政府

三年前，美國前國安局雇員史諾登爆料華府監聽外國政府後不久，蘋果公司（Apple）執行長庫克就開始收到來自全世界的信件，「你知道隱私對我們來說有多重要？」「你了解嗎？」

庫克當然了解。他很自豪自家公司靠販售手機、平板這些實體的電子產品賺錢，而非藉由竊取客戶的個人資料牟利。

這個立場在兩周前庫克與法界人士長談數小時後更加清楚透徹。美國聯邦法院先前要求蘋果公司協助聯邦調查局（FBI）解鎖加州聖伯納地諾槍擊案槍手的iPhone手機，但遭庫克拒絕。

庫克這次公開抵制政府執法單位，反映出他個人的轉變，從一個總是在幕後默默執行決策的經營者，變成全球最直言敢說的執行長。蘋果也在這個過程中，從一家總是神秘兮兮的矽谷科技廠，搖身一變成為多項熱門社會與法規議題的焦點。蘋果已故執行長賈伯斯儘管備受推崇，但從未在這類議題上像庫克一樣採取如此積極的態度。

與美國政府唱反調，對蘋果而言是招險棋，尤其在如今前景急速黯淡、全球最有價值公司寶座岌岌可危的情況下，可能引來社會批評。但熟悉庫克的人說，他自認除了出言反對，他沒有其他選擇。2011年接任蘋果執行長的庫克，始終大力提倡企業和其領導人應該要把自己視為公民社會裡的重要份子。去年9月時，他強調這份責任「在這20多年來已經大幅增加，因為政府發現自己很難向前邁進。」

前時代華納有線公司董事長龍根表示，庫克「只說自己相信的事，尤其是在艱困的狀況下」，至於拒絕法院要求的決定，「他目前正在處理一個非常棘手的狀況，他也知道自己做的決定會引發許多後果，好的壞的都有，但他想做正確的事。」

公民責任的意識，早在庫克小時候就已萌芽。2013年他在聯合國演說時提及一段往事，他曾親眼目睹3K黨在一個黑人家庭的院子焚燒十字架，當時他就大聲制止他們，「那段畫面深深地刻在我腦海裡，改變了我的一生。」

庫克1998年加入蘋果，在賈伯斯手下做事時，大多時候他都是非常安靜的一個主管。賈伯斯因病下台後，庫克開始讓蘋果變得更開放，先是出版年報，透露供應商與代工廠百萬工人的工作狀況。

接著於2014年，庫克公開自己是同性戀的身分。隔年，他投書媒體，譴責全美20多州已提案的宗教自由法案，因為這類法案能讓人以與宗教信仰相衝突為由，躲過反歧視法令的規定。

庫克的直言不諱自然招來許多批判，有些投資人質疑他推動的這些非關企業經營的事情，例如一些關於環保的舉措，與提升公司的獲利有何關聯。庫克在股東大會上回應：蘋果要做「公義且正確的事」，這點非常重要。

隨著全球客戶開始把愈來愈多個人資料放入蘋果的iPhone手機裡，庫克對個人隱私的立場也愈來愈堅定。另一方面，各國政府要求蘋果解鎖產品的場景不斷上演，也讓蘋果不堪其擾。

史諾登事件後，從各地湧入的信件，讓庫克更加確認自己的信念無誤。2014年8月上市的蘋果第八代行動作業系統iOS8，基本上已經連蘋果的工程師都無法從iPhone手機或iPad平板擷取任何資料。

庫克已告訴全公司上下，他打算加速把儲存在旗下所有產品的資料都加密的計畫，「如果你對公民自由有任何一點重視，你就不會依照執法單位的命令行事。」

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/technology/how-tim-cook-became-a-bulwark-for-digital-privacy.html

Video：Is Apple Right in Defying the F.B.I.?
http://nyti.ms/1RbkSyf

2016-02-29．經濟日報．A8．國際．編譯 廖玉玲