Bruce Sewell, Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Apple, Inc., is sworn in before testifying on data encryption during a House Judiciary Committee hearing titled, “The Encryption Tightrope: Balancing Americans’ Security and Privacy, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday”.
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“We’re asking Apple to take the vicious guard dog away and let us pick the lock”, said Comey.
A federal judge in Brooklyn ruled Monday that the government cannot force Apple to unlock an iPhone – a decision that could be a blow against the FBI in its legal battle to get Apple to open the phone of San Bernardino, Calif., shooter Syed Farook. The iPhone maker is in an arms race with cyber-criminals, hackers and terrorists, and the company just wants to ensure that customers’ privacy remains intact, Apple General Counsel Bruce Sewell told lawmakers on Tuesday.
The New York Times reports that Magistrate Judge James Orenstein denied the US government’s request for Apple to provide backdoor access to an iPhone that was used by Jun Feng, the suspect in an ongoing drug trafficking case in New York.
The American Civil Liberties Union, Access Now and the Wickr Foundation laid out arguments in amicus briefs released on Wednesday ahead of a March 22 hearing in which Judge Sheri Pym will review Apple’s appeal of a court order demanding it help unlock a phone used by Rizwan Farook.
According to Sewell’s prepared testimony, he will argue that Congress needs to decide the encryption issue and not leave it to judicial interpretation of the 1789 law.
The All Writs Act gives the USA government authority to “issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law”. The attacker’s iPhone is locked due to a security feature that disables the phone and encrypts data stored on it following 10 failed password attempts.
Comey said the government has tried hard to break into iPhones like the one in California.
Comey also acknowledged Tuesday there “was a mistake made” shortly after the San Bernardino attack, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation asked the county – which owned the phone – to reset the password for Farook’s iCloud account.
“I love encryption”, Comey insisted, but law enforcement “really does save people’s lives, rescue kids [and] rescue neighborhoods from terrorists… and we do it a whole lot through search warrants of mobile devices”.
In addition to the formal objection brief, Apple’s lawyers also filed a NY federal judge’s ruling earlier this week that sided with the company in a similar challenge in a drug trafficking case.
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Sewell backed up his case by calling on cryptology expert Professor Susan Landau, who argued that there was no way the FBI’s request could be carried out safely.
