Apple cannot be forced to break into a drug trafficker’s iPhone and hand its data to the authorities, a judge has decided.
The ruling in New York is a blow to the US government in its privacy fight with the company. The case involved a government information request similar to the one at the centre of a court battle between Apple and the FBI in California. That case involves an iPhone owned by Syed Farook, one of the perpetrators of the San Bernardino mass shooting, an atrocity linked to Islamic State. Last month the FBI won an order compelling Apple to break into Farook’s iPhone but Apple immediately challenged the ruling, triggering a war of words.
In New York on Monday night, Judge James Orenstein said that the US government could not use a 227-year-old law to force Apple to break into an iPhone, extract its data and hand the information to investigators. The government is using the same law to justify breaking into Farook’s iPhone.
Judge Orenstein said that the information request submitted by the government in the New York drug trafficking case was less intrusive than in the California terrorism case. He said that Apple should not be forced to assist the government against its will when it had no involvement in the crime at hand.
Farook and his wife killed 14 people and wounded a further 22 after they opened fire at an office party in San Bernardino, California, on December 2 last year. The couple were later killed in a gunfight with police. Investigators recovered an iPhone from Farook’s car but they have been unable to access the data inside it, because it is encrypted and protected by a passcode lock.
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James Comey, director of the FBI, Bruce Sewell, Apple’s top lawyer, and Cyrus Vance, the New York district attorney, were due to appear at a congressional hearing last night. Mr Sewell was to say that creating a tool to unlock iPhones, iPads and other devices would weaken the security of hundreds of millions of Apple products.
Mr Vance was to tell the judiciary committee that his office wants to break into 175 locked Apple devices, and that encryption “severely harms” criminal prosecutions at the state level, including in cases in his district involving at least 175 iPhones. “My colleagues from jurisdictions around the country have been running into the same roadblocks in their efforts to investigate and prosecute serious crimes,” he says in written remarks for the committee.