This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, February 18th, 2016. I'm Caleb Brown.

Apple CEO Tim Cook will fight a court order to assist the FBI.

The agency wants the company not to provide specific data but to compel Apple to write software

to compromise its own security.

What incentives might such an order create for other tech companies?

Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, offers his analysis.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has written an open letter to customers, sort of calling attention to the FBI's request and now a court order

to do what?

This is a rather unusual order.

It's very common in criminal investigations for a software company or a technology company

to be asked to turn over data they already have in their possession and of course in

the San Bernardino case the FBI has already obtained huge amounts of data that Apple

had in backup in their iCloud messages that were

posted on Facebook, data like that. What the FBI is asking for here is something

rather unusual. They are asking Apple to write them new software, in effect

a hacking tool that consists of a new customized version of the iOS operating system.

One of the San Bernardino shooters had an older iPhone that is apparently locked with a simple numerical pin

to protect the encrypted data on that phone.

And of course, Apple no longer has the capability to directly decrypt that data.

What the FBI wants them to do is to write a customized operating system that will no longer

erase the encryption keys stored on the phone if you guessed the wrong code too many times.

They want to be able to in essence automatically gas

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