New Tim Cook biography shows Apple CEO as a man of principles in battle with FBI over access to terrorist’s iPhone
- The book looks at the battle between Apple and the FBI over ‘back door’ access to the iPhone after a 2015 terror attack
- The argument highlighted Apple’s ‘consumer friendly’ use of customer data
The main thread in a new biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook is that he is a man of principle.
Nowhere was that more apparent than during Apple’s battle with the FBI in 2016, suggests author Leander Kahney in Tim Cook: The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level, an unauthorised biography that features interviews with company insiders.
In the book, Bruce Sewell, Apple’s general counsel at the time, talks about how the Apple team handled the FBI’s demand that the company make special software to allow it to unlock the iPhone of a suspect in the terror attack in San Bernardino that killed 14 people in December 2015.
It was “a bet-the-company kind of decision”, Sewell told Kahney, who is editor of Cult of Mac, a news site about everything Apple, and author of previous books about the late Steve Jobs and Apple executive Jony Ive.
Sewell said a magistrate judge’s order to unlock the iPhone prompted Cook and his team to stay up all night to craft a response, and that Cook was concerned about all the angles – from Apple’s legal position to how the public would perceive it.
