You're not the boss of me: Cybersecurity pros fear govement overreach in iPhone fight - CNET

Apple declined to comment for this story, but its lawyer, Ted Olson, made a similar point on Bloomberg News on Wednesday moing. "You cannot conscript a private company such as Apple to do something to change its products," he said.

The stakes in the Apple-FBI battle are high, touching on hot-button matters of both national security and personal privacy. The standoff, which started in mid-February, has tued up the heat on already simmering tensions between Washington and Silicon Valley over encryption, the technology that scrambles information to prevent unauthorized readers from seeing it.

The US Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment for this story. At RSA on Tuesday, US Attoey General Loretta Lynch argued that the federal govement can and should be able to access the data. "The law has a wonderful elastic quality to cover the issues that develop," she said during a question-and-answer session. "Having the inability to actually obtain evidence that would save lives is a real risk."

Certainly, cybersecurity is a major conce when it comes to the Apple-FBI standoff, which came to light last month after a federal judge granted a Justice Department request seeking Apple's help in cracking open an iPhone 5C tied to December's deadly terrorist attack in San Beardino, Califoia. Apple publicly denounced the court's order, which would require Apple to write new code to help the FBI gain entry to the phone, disabling the lock screen's auto-erase function en route to accessing the encrypted data.

Cybersecurity experts and civil libertarians worry that creating this new software could potentially make vast numbers of iPhones vulnerable. The very existence of such software would be dangerous, they argue, because it could be abused by govements, as well as criminals, if it got leaked. Apple and its supporters say that's true even if the govement has a warrant for an important criminal investigation.

"The worst way to make the country more secure is loosening security," said Miller Newton, chief executive of encryption company PKware.

But as they hurry to protect your encrypted cell phone, cybersecurity experts also balk at the idea of being pulled by the ear to the computer to write code for the govement. "You can't compel us to do something we weren't already doing," said Harvey Anderson, chief legal officer of AVG, an antivirus company.

It's a matter of control. When it comes to how strong to make their products against hackers and govement investigators alike, cybersecurity experts want companies to make that call themselves, without any changes after the fact mandated by the govement.