AVG’s Chief Legal Officer, Harvey Anderson recently sat down with Marty Gonzalez from San Francisco’s Kron 4 Morning News Weekend to discuss why Apple is fighting back against privacy disclosure.

Over the last few weeks the entire country has been discussing the court order enforcing Apple to unlock data security from the iOS device used by one of the alleged terrorists in the San Bernardino shooting.  Whether talks of support were in favor of the Federal government or for the tech giant, the larger issue that continues to rise to the surface is how this could jeopardize the privacy of millions of iOS users.

Recently, AVG’s Chief Legal Officer, Harvey Anderson sat down with San Francisco’s own Marty Gonzalez from Kron 4 Morning News Weekend, to discuss the severity of Apple complying with the ruling and unlocking the door to privacy.

VIDEO: Chief Legal Officer discusses Apple vs Federal Government

Gonzalez: ….So far it’s been a stalemate between the FBI and Apple. What would be the long term range impact of Apple refusing this court order to crack the code?

Anderson: I think it’s dangerous what’s happening right now…You’re essentially asking a company to introduce a vulnerability, a bug, a security flaw into its system. Once that happens, there’s not a lot of confidence that this bug will only be used for this case. Suppose an authoritarian government gets it, suppose a malicious hacker gets it. Will it also be used the next time you want to get data….?

Gonzalez: Let’s say people are, people are thinking, wait a minute, why doesn’t Apple just give the FBI the phone, Apple cracks the code and gives it back to the FBI and it’s just a one-time deal. Is that not plausible?

Anderson: Not really. Actually, what happened in this case is that Apple was working very closely with the FBI and right after the phone was taken into custody it appears that we just learned is that the Apple ID password was reset. So Apple has a very easy way to do an iCloud backup of this phone. The phone could have been brought to a trusted network, the network would have recognized the data, and then the government could have gotten the data from Apple’s Cloud which it has access to. But someone within the San Bernardino county officials recently tweeted that the FBI asked them to reset the passwords, which prevented this easy method to get the data.

Gonzalez: Apple and the Federal government have been arguing the whole topic about encryption for years. This is just the latest step. Where do you think this issue goes from here?

Anderson: It’s so unknown. It’s such a dangerous precedent. If this order is upheld. As you know this order was actually an ex parte order. Apple has not had a chance to oppose it legally but I think it’s such a dangerous to force a company to introduce a security flaw. The problem is that there is no privacy without security. That’s the underlining paradigm that exists here. Once you start to take away security, it starts to compromise people’s privacy. It’s not privacy against the proper judicial use of disclosure and discover it’s against others.

Gonzalez: Apple is arguing that once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Anderson: Exactly.