Google To Back Apple In Court Against FBI

A spokesman said: “The government’s request here creates an unprecedented burden on Apple and violates Apple’s First Amendment rights against compelled speech”.

U.S. lawmakers on Thursday called a hearing next week on encryption, saying they hope to craft “a solution” to the standoff between Apple and law enforcement over accessing locked devices.

The Supreme Court has previously found that the All Writs Act can be used to force a company’s cooperation, provided that the company was not “far removed” from the case in question.

Apple and the government, however, are at odds over a court order that investigators got to compel Apple to help them circumvent the iPhone’s security systems.

Apple is arguing to a federal judge that helping the FBI would be unduly burdensome, a legal overreach and a violation of its constitutional rights.

“Here, by contrast, the government has failed to demonstrate that the requested order was absolutely necessary to effectuate the search warrant, including that it exhausted all other avenues for recovering information”, the company’s lawyers write in their motion to vacate the court’s order.

That was one of the concerns Apple raised in its appeal.

If Apple succeeds in upgrading its security for a new iPhone, law enforcement agencies would face significant challenges breaking into phones, even if the Obama administration wins its fight to access Farook’s iPhone data, according to the Times.

Google makes the Android software that powers most smartphones in the world.

“Our goal is to find a solution that allows law enforcement to effectively enforce the law without harming the competitiveness of USA encryption providers or the privacy protections of U.S. citizens”, said a statement from Judiciary chairman Bob Goodlatte, a Republican from Virginia, and ranking Democrat John Conyers of MI.

Comey too urged Congress to take action.

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.

Key members of Congress are proposing a commission that would take a year to come up with recommendations on what to do about conflicts between encryption and security. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-California. Harris has held a lead in fundraising and independent polling, trailed by Sanchez.

One part of its argument that the order be dismissed depends on convincing the court that, as a third party to the investigation, it shouldn’t be required to expend time and resources that would create something that undercuts its own products.

The FBI wants Apple to write software that would give it unlimited attempts at the PIN with a computer program, but Apple’s answer is a hard no. In a motion to dismiss the court’s order, filed Thursday, the company says it has cooperated with investigators as much as it can, and this software request is unsafe, illegal and unconstitutional.

Comey insisted that the code the Federal Bureau of Investigation was asking Apple to create would work only on that one phone and would be retained by Apple.

Apple was expected to file a formal objection on Friday.

As Cook warns, if the government prevails, the existence of the software would present a security risk for all smartphone users. He said Apple’s stance hasn’t changed – instead, it’s the government’s request that has changed and become more expansive than ever.