Steve Wozniak on Apple vs. FBI: I'm with Apple on this one

Even though he’s not working there anymore, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak always has an opinion on all things Apple, and he doesn’t shy from saying it in public.

On Monday, Woz was a guest on Conan, where he shared his thoughts on Apple’s firm denial to help the FBI install a backdoor into an iPhone that once belonged to one of the terrorists behind the San Bernardino terrorist attack.

SEE ALSO: Apple and the FBI trade blows over digital security on Capitol Hill

“I side with Apple on this one,” Wozniak said, pointing out he’s a known human rights advocate and is one of the founders of non-profit digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

According to Wozniak, the FBI picked a “lame case” to prove that adding a backdoor to the iPhone is important for national security.

“The two phones owned by the people that aren’t even convicted terrorists didn’t have one link to a terrorist organization (…) so they wanna take this other phone, that they, the two didn’t destroy, that was a work phone…that’s so lame and worthless to expect something’s on it,” he told Conan O'Brien.

Wozniak also raised a point similar to the one Tim Cook did in his open letter to users in February: Once a way to bypass the encryption of an iPhone is revealed, the same technique can be used over and over again in the future.

“What if China says: Apple, you’ve got to give us a backdoor so we can get into any phone, even your government’s officials’ iPhones, and inspect them at any time. That’s wrong,” Wozniak concludes.

The legal battle between the FBI and Apple has caused a heated public debate in the past few weeks, with several prominent tech figures, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, siding with Apple. But while Apple enjoys a wide support among IT industry heavyweights, some politicians and the majority of Americans (according to some polls) think the company should yield to FBI’s request.