Apple Must Comply With Court Order to Unlock iPhone, DOJ Says

The judge in the San Bernardino iPhone case is not misinterpreting the All Writs Act by compelling Apple to bypass the encryption on the killer's phone, the U.S. Department of Justice argued in a court filing today.

The 1789 law gives federal courts wide latitude over issuing and enforcing warrants, but Apple says it should not apply in this case. The DOJ disagreed, writing in its filing that "Congress intended the All Writs Act to flexibly meet 'new problems' like those devised by Apple."

Apple has rejected the FBI's request to unlock the shooter's iPhone. To do that, the company would have to create a new operating system to crack the device's encryption, which Apple CEO Tim Cook says is a slippery slope. If it falls into the wrong hands, it could do serious damage to the security of iPhones around the globe, he said.

The DOJ sharply criticized Apple's slippery slope argument, writing that "Apple's rhetoric is not only false, but also corrosive of the very institutions that are best able to safeguard our liberty and our rights: the courts, the Fourth Amendment, longstanding precedent and venerable laws, and the democratically elected branches of government."

In order to avoid complying with the court's order, Apple must show that attempts to break the encryption would create an undue burden on the company. The DOJ said it has not met that requirement, arguing that Apple's assistance in the case would not require excessive amounts of employee time to write new code, nor would it impinge on its ability to market products with strong encryption.

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Furthermore, Apple's assistance in disabling the encryption is the only way that the FBI can gain access to the phone, the DOJ argued, writing that "Apple itself has implied that the government could not disable the requisite features."

The DOJ's stance is the same as the one it took earlier this week when it filed a brief in a similar case in New York, in which the judge wrote that the Act cannot compel Apple to unlock a phone involved in a drug case. In that case, the DOJ argued that the judge's decision "goes far afield of the circumstances of this case and sets forth an unprecedented limitation on federal courts' authority."