This is Tim Cook's statement, " "The government is asking Apple to hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers -- including tens of millions of American citizens -- from sophisticated hackers and cybercriminals," Cook wrote. "The same engineers who built strong encryption into the iPhone to protect our users would, ironically, be ordered to weaken those protections and make our users less safe." And here the US officials remark," The White House reportedly fired back at Apple following the publication of Cook's letter. Authorities aren't asking the tech company to create a "backdoor," a representative said -- they just want access to the single iPhone in question. "