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| In this photo taken Nov. 15, 2015, Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks in Milan, Italy. A U.S. magistrate judge has ordered Apple to help the FBI break into a work-issued iPhone used by one of the two gunmen in the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, a significant legal victory for the Justice Department in an ongoing policy battle between digital privacy and national security. Apple CEO Tim Cook immediately objected, setting the stage for a high-stakes legal fight between Silicon Valley and the federal government. |
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- An extraordinary legal fight is brewing with major privacy
implications for millions of cellphone users after a federal magistrate
ordered Apple Inc. to help the FBI hack into an iPhone used by the
gunman in the San Bernardino mass shootings.
The
clash brings to a head a long-simmering debate between technology
companies insistent on protecting digital privacy and law enforcement
agencies concerned about losing their ability to recover evidence or
eavesdrop on the communications of terrorists or criminals.
On
Wednesday, the White House quickly disputed the contention by Apple's
chief executive officer, Tim Cook, that the Obama administration is
seeking to force the software company to build a "backdoor" to bypass
digital locks protecting consumer information on Apple's popular
iPhones.
The early arguments set the stage for
what will likely be a protracted policy and public relations fight in
the courts, on Capitol Hill, on the Internet and elsewhere.
"They
are not asking Apple to redesign its product or to create a new
backdoor to one of their products," White House spokesman Josh Earnest
said. "They're simply asking for something that would have an impact on
this one device."
Within hours of the judge's
order on Tuesday telling Apple to aid the FBI with special software in
the case, Cook promised a court challenge. He said the software the FBI
would need to unlock the gunman's work-issued iPhone 5C would be "too
dangerous to create" and "undeniably" a backdoor.
Cook
compared it to a master key, capable of opening hundreds of millions of
locks, and said there was no way to keep the technique secret once it
was developed.
"Once the information is known,
or a way to bypass the code is revealed, the encryption can be defeated
by anyone with that knowledge," Cook said.
At
the center of the debate is the private information carried on nearly
900 million iPhones sold worldwide: Photographs, videos, chat messages,
health records and more.
There also was swift
reaction on the presidential campaign trail, where Donald Trump told Fox
News that he agreed "100 percent with the courts," and on Capitol Hill,
where the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr,
R-N.C., said, "Court orders are not optional and Apple should comply."
Democratic
Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, who fought encryption in the
1990s, said she thought the government should be able to access the
phone. On Twitter, Edward Snowden called it "the most important tech
case in a decade."
But Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., called the Justice Department's request "unconscionable and unconstitutional."
The
ruling by U.S. Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym represents a significant
victory for the Justice Department, which last year decided not to
pursue a legislative fix to address encryption but has now scored a win
instead in the courts.
Federal officials until
now have struggled to identify a high-profile case to make its concerns
resonate. But in siding with the government, Pym, a former federal
prosecutor, was persuaded that agents investigating the worst terror
attack on U.S. soil since Sept. 11 had been hobbled by their inability
to unlock the county-owned phone used by Syed Farook, who along with his
wife, Tashfeen Malik, killed 14 people in December before dying in a
police shootout.
The dispute places Apple, one
of the world's most respected companies, on the side of protecting the
digital privacy of an accused Islamic terrorist.
"We have no sympathy for terrorists," Cook said.
Apple
has provided default encryption on its iPhones since 2014, allowing any
device's contents to be accessed only by the user who knows the phone's
passcode. The phone Farook was using, running the newest version of
Apple's iPhone operating system, was configured to erase data after 10
consecutive, unsuccessful unlocking attempts.
The
magistrate ordered Apple to create special software the FBI could load
onto the phone to bypass the self-destruct feature. The FBI wants to be
able to try different combinations in rapid sequence until it finds the
right one.
The Justice Department said it was
asking Apple to help unlock only the iPhone used by Farook and owned by
the county government where he worked as an environmental inspector. The
judge said the software should include a "unique identifier" so that it
can't be used to unlock other iPhones.
"If a
court can legally compel Apple to do that, then it likely could legally
compel any other software provider to do the same thing," including
helping the government install tracking or eavesdropping software on a
phone or laptop, said Kevin Bankston, director of the Open Technology
Institute at New America.
It was unclear how
readily the software might be modified to work against other iPhones, or
how quickly Apple might update its own software to render the new
bypass ineffective.
The next step in the case
wasn't immediately clear, either. The judge gave Apple five days to
contest the order as unreasonably burdensome. A magistrate judge on the
lowest rung of the federal judiciary almost certainly could not
establish meaningful precedent without affirmation from a higher-court
judge, which means the fight is likely to proceed up the chain.
The
former head of the FBI division responsible for producing some of the
FBI's most cunning surveillance tools, Marcus Thomas, said Apple faces a
challenge in showing that the government's request is overly
burdensome. Thomas, the chief technology officer at Subsentio LLC, said
companies that build ultra-secure products that might be used by
criminals or terrorists can expect government requests for help.
"Society
wants to know that companies aren't producing these complicated
services and devices that can be used as weapons against them," he said.
