The letter filed in the federal court in Brooklyn, the prosecutors used the pass code to access the iPhone and the Justice department does not need any assistance from Apple Inc. anymore. The government had been about to appeal a recent ruling in favor of Apple which said officials didn’t have the authority to force companies to allow investigators into devices, the Wall Street Journal reports, which makes the sudden end of the casea big setback for the government.
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The surprise notice marked the second time in less than a month that the government withdrew its demand for Apple’s help and brought to a close a closely-watched legal battle over the government’s authority to force technical assistance from a tech firm.
In a statement issued Friday night, Emily Pierce, a Department of Justice spokesman, reiterated the government’s claim that such cases “have never been about setting a court precedent”.
The Justice Department last month revealed that an entity outside the government had approached it with a method that could be used to open the phone used by Syed Farook, who along with his wife killed 14 people in the December attacks before dying in a police shootout.
Apple said prosecutors were going too far, especially since Congress had more recently limited what communications providers could be compelled to do.
The case involves an iPhone 5s that was seized from suspect Jun Feng as part of a 2014 drug investigation in NY.
Previously, the government had refused to yield in the NY case even after withdrawing a similar order in San Bernardino, which would have forced Apple to build software capable of bypassing the iPhone’s security features.
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FBI Director James Comey hinted at an event Thursday in London that the FBI paid more than $1 million to break into the locked iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino attackers. But the issue, the feds say, isn’t a matter of being able to access the phones, but rather the message Apple sends by refusing to cooperate.
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The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has again managed to crack an iPhone 5s that belonged to a NY drug dealer without any help from Apple. But in the NY case, it seems the government overlooked several possibilities-including, apparently, asking Feng for the passcode after he was convicted.
