Wednesday, March 02, 2016

FBI Breaking Its Brand In Battle vs. Apple Inc

“How to Destroy Brand Credibility In One Simple Mis-Step..” is a lead-in typically associated with a corporation that has stumbled when responding to an event that has triggered an outright PR crisis. However, as the debate between privacy protectionists and law enforcement over-reachers continues to rage over the topic of whether Apple Inc should be compelled to reverse engineer its own product and prove that its product is not as secure as its millions of customers expect it to be, instead of following simple steps, the FBI is breaking down its own brand.

FBI Director Jim Comey, a long-time government prosecutor wonk who took a sabbatical from a close on 20-year tenure in various roles at DOJ to serve as General Counsel for global hedge fund Bridgewater Associcates before being recruited back by Uncle Sam, has effectively shot himself in the foot. Instead of breaking into a terrorist phone, Comey is breaking the ever-fragile brand image of the country’s top domestic law enforcement agency and given yet another reason for everyone to question the brand credibility and integrity of the federal law enforcement agency he’s in charge of.

Courtesy of below extract from just one of dozens of headline stories appearing across the media this morning, here’s why:

(ReCode)-FBI Director James Comey for the first time admitted that “there was a mistake made” when the agency directed that the Apple ID password associated with the shooter’s phone be changed. Comey made the admission today, in response to a question raised during a House Judiciary Committee hearing into the question of encryption. One committee member asked whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation had foreclosed the possibility of obtaining a current backup of a phone used by one of the shooters, Syed Farook, when it directed his employer to change the password on the account. “There was a mistake made in the first 24 hours, where the county, at the FBI’s request, made it hard to make the phone back up by [changing the password of] the iCloud account,” Comey said in testimony. The FBI had previously stated that changing the password wasn’t a screw-up. -

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