Google, Facebook, Others Plan Briefs Supporting Apple In iPhone Case

An iPhone is seen in Washington, Feb. 17, 2016. WATCH VIDEO: Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks about phone encryption battle with FBIIn an exclusive interview with ABC News anchor David Muir, Cook told him this week, creating that software wasn’t going to happen.

Apple is refusing to comply with a court order requiring it to create tools that will make it easier for FBI investigators to unlock the phone used by one of the attackers in the December massacre in San Bernardino, California. The person asked not to be identified because Google is still drafting the document. “If this order is permitted to stand, it will only be a matter of days before some other prosecutor, in some other important case, before some other judge, seeks a similar order using this case as precedent”. “Apple strongly supports, and will continue to support, the efforts of law enforcement in pursuing justice against terrorists and other criminals – just as it has in this case and many others”, the company said in its filing, known as a motion to vacate.

Microsoft itself is fighting the USA government over an order to turn over a suspected drug traffickers e-mails that are stored in one of the companys data centers in Ireland. He has also driven the company to raise its profile in Washington.

Cook, who expressed the company’s sympathy for the families of the shooting victims, said the only way for Apple to provide more information on the phone Farook used would be to hack the phone using the software it so strongly opposes. Bill Gates, Silicon Valley execs, and even Marco Rubio have offered competing opinions on the nuances of the issue, and even the judge overseeing the case requested the technical details of what would be involved for Apple to comply with the FBI’s demands in addition to the company’s legal arguments against compliance.

A debate over encryption and law enforcement access to devices needs to happen in the courts, at the Department of Justice, and in Congress, added Comey, who began raising concerns about law enforcement access to encrypted digital communications in late 2014. “The All Writs Act does not support such sweeping use of judicial power, and the First and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution forbid it”, the statement reads.

Apple has said that the United States government is seeking “dangerous power” by forcing the company to unlock a terrorist’s phone, in landmark legal filings that challenge the Obama administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“The only way to get information, at least now the only way we know, is to write a piece of software that we view as sort of the software equivalent of cancer“, Cook said.

The company has responded to an order issued last week, which compels Apple to help weaken the security on a phone used by the San Bernardino killer and give access to its contents. That, says Apple, marshaling an impressive-sounding string of legal reasons, is what makes this case different-a precedent that, once set, will bend tech firms to the government’s every future whim. The FBI asked for the ability to have a computer guess the phone’s passcode.