The U.S. Department of Justice filed a motion
on Friday seeking to compel Apple Inc to comply with a judge’s order to unlock
the encrypted iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters,
portraying the tech giant’s refusal as a “marketing strategy.”
In response, a senior Apple executive, speaking
with reporters on condition of anonymity, characterized the Justice
Department’s filing as an effort to argue its case in the media before the
company has a chance to respond.
The back and forth escalated a showdown between
the Obama administration and Silicon Valley over security and privacy that
ignited earlier this week.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is seeking
the tech company’s help to access shooter Syed Rizwan Farook’s phone by
disabling some of its passcode protections. The company so far has pushed back
and on Thursday won three extra days to respond to the order.
Another senior Apple executive said Congress is
the right place for a debate over encryption, not a courtroom.
The executive said Apple was stunned that such
a legal request had come from the U.S. government rather than a country with
weaker traditions of protecting privacy and civil liberties.
The motion to compel Apple to comply did not
carry specific penalties for the company, and the Justice Department declined
to comment on what recourse it was willing to seek.
In the order, prosecutors acknowledged that the
latest filing was “not legally necessary” since Apple had not yet responded to
the initial order.
The clash between Apple and the Justice
Department has driven straight to the heart of a long-running debate over how
much law enforcement and intelligence officials should be able to monitor
digital communications.
A federal court hearing in California has been
scheduled for March 22 in the case, according to Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for
the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California.
The Justice Department said its Friday motion
was a response to Apple CEO Tim Cook’s public statement Wednesday, which
included a refusal to “hack our own users and undermine decades of security
advancements that protect our customers.”
“Rather than assist the effort to fully
investigate a deadly terrorist attack … Apple has responded by publicly
repudiating that order,” prosecutors wrote in the Friday filing.
“Apple’s current refusal to comply with the
court’s order, despite the technical feasibility of doing so, instead appears
to be based on its concern for its business model and public brand marketing
strategy,” prosecutors said.
ID CHANGE POSES HURDLE
The two senior Apple executives said the
company had worked hard to help investigators and tried multiple avenues
including sending engineers with FBI agents to a WiFi network that would
recognize the phone and begin an automatic backup if that had been enabled.
They
criticized government officials who reset the Apple identification associated
with the phone, which closed off the possibility of recovering information from
it through that automatic cloud backup.
San
Bernardino County reset the password on the iCloud account at the request of
the FBI, said county spokesman David Wert.
The
government first disclosed the identification change in a footnote to its
filing Friday. The Apple executives said that the reset occurred before Apple
was consulted. The Justice Department declined to comment on that contention.
The
two sides have been on a collision course since Apple and Alphabet Inc’s Google
began offering default end-to-end encryption on their devices in 2014, a move
prompted in part by the surveillance revelations from former National Security
Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
But
the Justice Department struggled to find a compelling case where encryption
proved to be an insurmountable hurdle for its investigators until the Dec. 2
shooting rampage by Farook and his wife in San Bernardino, California, which
killed 14. Authorities believe the couple was inspired by the Islamic State.
Some
technology experts and privacy advocates backing Apple suggest Farook’s work
phone likely contains little data of value. They have accused the Justice
Department of choreographing the case to achieve a broader goal of gaining
support for legislation or a legal precedent that would force companies to
crack their encryption for investigators.
The
case has quickly become a topic in the U.S. presidential race. Republican
frontrunner Donald Trump on Friday called for a “boycott” against Apple until
the company complied with the court order.
The
two Apple executives said they felt in good company, noting that Trump has
faulted many other groups and individuals.
The
debate will also play out on Capitol Hill. Bipartisan leaders of the U.S. House
Energy and Commerce Committee late Friday invited Apple’s Cook and FBI Director
James Comey to testify at an upcoming hearing on encryption, though a date was
not set.
The
House Judiciary Committee is also planning an encryption hearing for March and
has invited Apple to attend, according to a congressional source.
(Reporting
by Julia Edwards and Dustin Volz; Additional reporting by Lisa Richwine in Los
Angeles, David Ingram in Washington, Dan Levine, Julia Love and Joseph Menn in
San Francisco; Editing by Bill Rigby, Cynthia Osterman and Lisa Shumaker)
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