If Tim Cook wants this not to happen in this country (or anywhere), then he needs to ensure that future Apple products are sufficiently secure that he can say, "there's nothing I do to help - this device cannot be broken into by any method we know of."
That doesn't actually prevent the government from issuing orders with dire consequences for violation to manufacturers to break into devices on behalf of the government, it just means that such orders will leave manufacturers no choice but to accept the dire consequences -- and, if they can't, to stop manufacturing devices that they can't break into.
If you are referring to the law invoked in the Apple case (the All Writs Act), a company unable to comply does not face legal consequences. From Wikipedia:
"In the case U.S. v. New York Telephone Co. 434 U.S. 159 (1977), the Supreme Court established a three-factor test for the admissible application of the All Writs Act: the party ordered to perform an action cannot be too far removed from the case, the government's request cannot impose an undue burden on that party, and the party's assistance is necessary."[1]
I'm not a lawyer (and law can be tricky), but forcing a company to do something impossible (breaking into a truly secure device) seems very clearly to be a "undue burden". The real issue here is that Apple has created a device that is possible for them to backdoor themselves, and the clear solution is to remove that capability from future devices.
Actually it does. After all the warrant was issued after apple claimed they have the technical capability to do so. I am willing to bet that even judges will admit laws of physics being higher power than them.
Apple screwed themselves by not creating lets say double signed bootloaders - the code must be signed by the owner and by apple to run. In that case the only probable attack is microcode on the cpu or apple saying to the federal government - here are the transistors you need - good luck getting to them - we don't have the equipment to dig in microchips.
But if you accept that evolution of the internet in this direction in inevitable and a natural process of history, then this is like saying that "there's nothing stopping the government from issuing orders that gravity be temporarily disabled."
> But if you accept that evolution of the internet in this direction in inevitable
I don't accept that the evolution of the internet in the direction of consumer devices with manufacturer-unbreakable security is inevitable, particularly in the face of governments actively punishing manufacturers for failing to break into devices at the governments' demand.
In fact, I would argue that such an evolution is quite evitable.
There is nothing "inevitable" about the process of history. Governments can and have limited the ability of companies to secure data in the past and they will do it again, given the chance.
