Trump doubles down on demand that Apple unlock criminal's iPhones

Trump has repeated his previous demand that Apple help investigators unlock iPhones tied to criminal cases.

"Apple has to help us. And I'm very strong on it," Trump told CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "They have the keys to so many criminals and criminal minds, and we can do things."

"I've given them waivers, because it's a great company, but it made a big difference." Trump said.

Alongside Trump, U.S. Attorney General William Barr has publicly asked Apple to unlock a pair of iPhones used by the gunman who killed three people in Pensacola, Florida in December, complaining Apple has so far provided no "substantive assistance" to the investigation.

While Apple would not help unlock the gunman's physical phone, they did provide access to data from his iCloud account just hours after the request. Any device backups found in iCloud could have provided contact information, pictures, and texts from iMessage and other messaging apps to the authorities.

Governments and agencies, such as the FBI and the police, are in favor of weakening security by introducing backdoors, which would provide a similar function to wiretaps of providing law enforcement officials with a means to see the communications between two parties of interest.

In June, it was revealed the Trump administration was considering the possibility of outlawing end-to-end encryption in its entirety.

Tech companies and privacy advocates insist that adding a backdoor to encryption fundamentally weakens it. It was recently claimed that Apple had abandoned plans for end-to-end iCloud backup encryption after getting negative feedback from the FBI.