San Francisco: Yesterday,Apple chief Tim Cook went public in his battle with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), saying that unlocking an iPhone in the name of fighting terrorism would be “bad for America.” “He equated code capable of breaking into an iPhone to a “software equivalent of cancer” that should never be unleashed on the world.

Cook said during a television interview with ABC News, “This is not about this phone”. “This is about the future. It is a precedent that should not be done in this country, or in any country.” Apple is battling the United States government over unlocking devices in at least 10 cases in addition to its high-profile dispute involving the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino attackers, court documents show.

Apple has been in a legal fight with the government in the San Bernardino case, where the FBI wants the company to help hack the iPhone of Syed Farook, a US citizen, who gunned down 14 people with his Pakistani wife Tashfeen Malik in the California city in December. When asked how he felt about Apple taking the stand with the chance information on Farook’s iPhone might prevent another terrorist attack, Cook responded: “Some things are hard and some things are right. And some things are both. This is one of those things.”

Cook maintained that the definite dangers of creating a way to crack into iPhone encryption trumped concerns about “something that might be there,” adding he felt Apple was making the right choice. Apple is being asked to write software that the company believes would make hundreds of millions of iPhones around the world vulnerable, according to Cook. The only way Apple knows to get more information from Farook’s iPhone would be to “write a piece of software that we view as the software equivalent of cancer; we think it is bad news to write,” Cook said.