Donald Trump says that Apple should comply with a California judge’s order to help the FBI break into the phone of one of the San Bernardino shooters.
“I agree 100% with the courts,” Trump said on “Fox and Friends” on Wednesday morning. “In that case, we should open it up. I think security over all — we have to open it up, and we have to use our heads. We have to use common sense.”
Trump strongly argued that the Apple should unlock the phones, adding, the shooters “killed 14 people, other people laying desperately ill in the hospital from what they did. These are two people radicalized who were given a wedding party by the people they killed! There’s something going on. We have to be very careful, we have to be very vigilant.”
“But to think that Apple won’t allow us to get into her cell phone,” Trump continued, “who do they think they are? No, we have to open it up.”
And the Republican presidential front-runner dismissed the argument, made by Apple and other cybersecurity experts, that opening a so-called “back door,” which allows the government to access encrypted phones, would lead to breaches by cybercriminals.
“Apple, this is one case, this is a case that certainly we should be able to get into the phone,” he said. “And we should find out what happened, why it happened, and maybe there’s other people involved and we have to do that.”
Apple responded to the court order with a public letter saying it opposes such a move, labeling the instruction “an overreach by the U.S. government.”
The letter, signed by Apple’s CEO Tim Cook and published Tuesday, warns that complying with the order would entail building “a backdoor to the iPhone,” creating “something we consider too dangerous to create.”
“The government is asking Apple to hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers — including tens of millions of American citizens — from sophisticated hackers and cybercriminals,” the letter reads.