The Brooklyn case emerged late a year ago as a new legal test in the fight over encryption and privacy, but it was overshadowed for months by a bigger fight over the locked iPhone of a Syed Rizwan Farook, who along with his wife killed 14 people and injured 22 others in a shooting at a December 2 holiday party of county workers in San Bernardino.
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A NY judge has ordered tech giant Apple to assist law enforcement officers examining the iPhone of an alleged gang member, according to a court filing unsealed in Boston.
An Apple attorney said Friday the company is disappointed that the government is doubling down on its request, even after the judge in the case, U.S. Magistrate Judge James Orenstein, decided that its reliance on the antiquated All Writs Act to compel Apple in the matter was an overreach.
Lawyers for the Justice Department wrote to Judge Margo K. Brodie in Brooklyn on Friday asking for Apple’s help extracting data from a phone belonging to meth dealer Jun Feng.
The phone in NY belonged to a drug dealer who has pleaded guilty to intending to distribute methamphetamines.
But, unlike the high-profile encryption case in San Bernardino, the judge’s order said that “Apple is not required to attempt to decrypt, or otherwise enable law enforcement’s attempts to access any encrypted data”. Government officials said, however, that the encryption workaround they discovered only works for one particular phone and operating system. The company plans to seek assurance that the government exhausted all options for accessing the contents of the phone in the drug case.
According to an affidavit, the iPhone will likely contain evidence for the government’s racketeering case against Crawford.
The executive called the judge’s ruling a “thoughtful”, “cogent” and “masterly piece of analysis”, noting that the judge ruled against government arguments citing case law and the legislative history of the All Writs Acts, which has formed much of the basis for the government’s arguments in trying to force Apple to help in both the NY case and the San Bernardino case.
Meanwhile, on February 16, Apple received the legal demand to help the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the San Bernardino case, which grabbed headlines as a terror attack and promised to win public support for the government.
Investigators still require Apple’s assistance to access the secure data on the iPhone 5s, the law enforcement official said.
Since then, Apple has declined to comply with such orders without a fight, a person close to the company said. Apple is being asked to extract data from an iPhone and provide it for purposes of sentencing. As drafted, the legislation would require any individual or company to comply with any US court order and hand over data to authorities, including data that is encrypted or made “unintelligible” by other means.
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Earlier in the day, the Department of Justice filed a declaration that it will not modify its request to get Apple’s help in a Brooklyn case.
