Apple cannot be forced to provide the FBI with data from a locked iPhone, a federal judge has ruled in America.
James Orenstein, a US magistrate judge, said that a 227-year-old law could not be used in a Brooklyn drug case, which is likely to have implications on the government’s wider battle with Apple on privacy and public safety.
The outcome supports Apple’s position in its fight against a California judge’s order that it help the FBI hack into an iPhone linked to the San Bernardino terrorism investigation.
Judge Orenstein said that lawyers had been stretching an old law “to produce impermissibly absurd results”.
He said the claim that Apple must assist the government because it reaped the benefits of being an American company “reflects poorly on a government that exists in part to safeguard the freedom of its citizens”.
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The California case involves an iPhone 5C owned by San Bernardino County and used by Syed Farook, one of its health inspectors. Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik killed 14 people during an attack on December 2 inspired by Islamic State. The couple died in a gun battle with police.
Both cases hinge partly on whether the 1789 All Writs Act could be used to compel Apple to co-operate with efforts to retrieve data from encrypted phones.
Judge Orenstein wrote: “Ultimately, the question to be answered in this matter, and in others like it across the country, is not whether the government should be able to force Apple to help it unlock a specific device; it is instead whether the All Writs Act resolves that issue and many others like it yet to come.”
He added: “I conclude that it does not.”
Last week Apple formally objected to the California order, accusing the federal government of seeking “dangerous power” through the courts and of trampling on the company’s constitutional rights.
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Judge Orenstein referred to the California case multiple times in a 50-page ruling and noted that the government request there was far more “intrusive”.
The New York case features a government request far less onerous for Apple; the extraction technique exists for that older operating system and has been used about 70 times previously to assist investigators.
In a statement released after the ruling the Justice Department said that it was disappointed and planned to appeal. It said Apple had agreed many times previously to assist the government and “only changed course when the government’s application for assistance was made public by the court”.
Apple has since declined to co-operate in a dozen more instances involving government requests to aid criminal investigations by retrieving data from iPhones.