Tim Cook on FBI fight: 'This case is not about one phone. This case is about the future'

"This case is not about one phone. This case is about the future," Tim Cook said to David Muir on ABC World News Tonight Wednesday

"What is at stake here is: Can the government compel Apple to write software that we believe would make hundreds of millions of customers vulnerable around the world, including the U.S. and also trample civil liberties that are at the basic foundation at what this country was made on?"

Cook went further, calling the software the FBI is asking it to write — in order to gain access to a phone belonging to the shooter in the San Bernardino attack that killed 14 in December — "the software equivalent of cancer." Earlier this month, a judge ordered Apple to create a so-called backdoor for the FBI to hack the shooter's work-issued iPhone. Apple revealed the FBI is asking it to create the software because a San Bernardino County employee reset the Apple ID associated with the iPhone 5C in an attempt to access the data, bungling future attempts to get in. The gunman, Syed Farook, worked for the county. Read more...