On December 2nd, 2015, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik opened fire on the city of San Bernardino, California, leaving 14 people, and the two shooters, dead. During the investigation the FBI obtained Farook's iPhone, but could not access it through the passcode. They went Apple to unlock it, and Apple couldn't help.



The iPhone's encryption methods were so secure, according to Apple, that Apple itself couldn't access the data on the phone. As a result, the U.S. government wanted Apple to purposefully weaken the encryption of its iPhones, putting a "backdoor" in the iOS framework that would allow the FBI to access the contents of iPhones everywhere. But this would also leave the operating system much more vulnerable to hackers and other governments.



The battle over online privacy has been waging on since the popularization of the internet itself. These discussions with Apple in particular have brought privacy activists and law enforcement head to head, fighting over who can utilize the privacy provided by encryption and what they can use that encryption for.



Messaging apps like Signal, WhatsApp and iMessage are encrypted. That means the messages are kept private from everyone except the intended recipient. And while these platforms are far from perfect – Jeff Bezos' phone was recently accessed through a malicious video message via WhatsApp – many people rely on the privacy encryption provides daily.



Esra'a Al Shafei, for example, built a social platform called Ahwaa where individuals who identify as LGBTQ+ can virtually meet and talk with each other in Middle Eastern and North African countries such as Egypt, where homosexuality is not expressly illegal, but where the government has used laws against what they call debauchery, among others, to criminalize LGBTQ+ individuals.

