Some San Bernardo victims support efforts to hack iPhone

“They are not asking for some general thing, they are asking for a particular case”, Gates told the Financial Times.

Protesters are preparing to assemble in more than 30 cities to lash out at the Federal Bureau of Investigation for obtaining a court order that requires Apple to make it easier to unlock an encrypted iPhone used by a gunman in December’s mass murders in California.

Court records released on Tuesday show the U.S. Justice Department has in the last four months sought court orders to force Apple Inc to help investigators extract data from 15 iPhones in cases across the country. The White House said that it was “an important national priority”, the Department of Justice filed a motion explaining its motives and Bill Gates said Apple should unlock the iPhone.

The heads of many tech companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google have sided with Apple. Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, killed 14 people at an office holiday party in an attack at least partly inspired by the Islamic State group.

Gates said he welcomed a debate on the issue “so that the safeguards are built” but also to ensure the government does get access in some situations.

The letter was addressed to U.S. Magistrate Judge James Orenstein, who since October has been weighing whether to order Apple to provide authorities access to data on a locked iPhone in a narcotics-related case.

“Should governments be able to access information at all or should they be blind, that’s essentially what we are talking about”, he told the BBC. But they can’t get all the data they want unless Apple writes what it claims is “an entirely new operating system” with drastically weakened protections against a trial-and-error approach to guessing the passcode that will unlock the phone itself. It makes us, I think, more sympathetic to what Apple is arguing for. “That’s it. We don’t want to break anyone’s encryption or set a master key loose on the land”. These other 12 cases do not involve terrorism, notes the WSJ and adds that “Privacy advocates are likely to seize on the cases’ existence as proof the government aims to go far beyond what prosecutors have called the limited scope of the current public court fight over a locked iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters”.