The crowd wasn’t the kind you’d see at the launch of a new iPhone.
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Apple chief executive Tim Cook has made headlines over the past week after indicating that the company intends to resist a court order that the company help the Federal Bureau of Investigation override several iPhone security features by creating a software “master key”.
While the act has been used in the past to compel telephone companies to help investigators track calls, those telephone companies already possessed the infrastructure to do the tracking.
As reported last week, Theodore Boutrous who frequently represents media organizations, is one of the marquee lawyers hired by Apple to wage its high-stakes legal battle – outlined the arguments Apple plans when it responds to the court order this week.
Bill Gates, a founder of Microsoft, publicly broke with Apple in its clash with the Justice Department over access to an iPhone that belonged to an attacker in the December mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif.
Apple v United States of America – what happened?
The FBI and the court are not telling Apple to unlock the phone but to disable certain security mechanisms like auto-erase. But the legal fight over your rights and the government’s needs isn’t just playing out in California after the San Bernardino massacre. “They are not asking for some general thing, they are asking for a particular case”.
The New York court’s request covers a specific time span; in a footnote in its filing, Apple says that shortly before that period, it also received three other orders – two in OH on September 24, and one in IL on October 6.
Lt. Peter Kelly, who runs the computer forensic lab for the Metro Law Enforcement Council, said of all technological devices, authorities are most frequently asked to review smartphones.
Top names in Silicon Valley, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have stepped forward in support of Apple as it pushes the government to drop a request to unlock the iPhone.
The email acknowledges that it is technically possible for Apple to do what the judge ordered, but that it’s “something we believe is too risky to do”.
“When you’re requiring a private entity not just to unlock something, or not just to show you something, but to actually change their design – then you start getting into different grounds”, Bartholomew said.
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Apple intends to argue that the 1789 law has never been used to compel a company to write software to help the government.
