NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. Justice Department said it has withdrawn a request to force Apple to reveal data from a cellphone linked to a New York drug case after someone provided federal investigators with the phone’s passcode.
Federal prosecutors said in a letter to U.S. District Judge Margo Brodie that investigators were able to access the iPhone late Thursday night after using the passcode.
The government said it no longer needs Apple’s assistance to unlock the iPhone and is withdrawing its request for an order requiring Apple’s cooperation in the drug case.
“As we have said previously, these cases have never been about setting a court precedent; they are about law enforcement’s ability and need to access evidence on devices pursuant to lawful court orders and search warrants,” Justice Department spokeswoman Emily Pierce said in a statement Friday.
The Justice Department had sought to compel the Cupertino, California-based Apple to cooperate in the drug case, even though it had recently dropped a fight to compel Apple to help break into an iPhone used by a gunman in a December attack in San Bernardino that killed 14 people. In that case, a still-unidentified third-party came forward with a technique that managed to open the phone. That entity has not been named, and the Justice Department has not revealed the method used.
Representatives for Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday night.
The tech giant had been fighting the Justice Department’s attempts and said in court papers last week the government’s request was extraordinary because there is likely minimal evidentiary value of any data on the phone and that Congress never authorized it to pursue such requests through the 1789 All Writs Act. It also said there is no proof Apple’s assistance was necessary and that the same technique the FBI was using to get information from the phone in California might work with the drug case phone.
But prosecutors had argued that the government needed Apple’s assistance to access the data, which they contended was “authorized to search by warrant.”
On Thursday, several law enforcement groups filed arguments in Brooklyn federal court saying they feared the public will stop aiding police if Apple is allowed to refuse to give up information from the phone in the drug case. The groups said they supported the government’s efforts to try to reverse a magistrate judge’s ruling earlier this year for Apple.
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Associated Press writer Eric Tucker in Washington contributed to this report.
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
So is there going to be a headline lawsuit now every time they pick up an iPhone?
When Apple says they won’t help, even to catch a murderer, I think it’s great for the FBI to publicize every time they get what they need without Apple’s help. The major motivation for Apple is the ability to market to miscreants that if they keep their incriminating data on an iPhone, no law enforcement will ever get it. Headlines like this put the lie to that bit of marketing hype.
Apple is not the only one playing this game, however. Google, the company that makes a fortune every day invading people’s privacy made my phone, and it has encryption turned on with no control to turn it off. I’d rather not be wasting the limited computing power of the phone on encrypting data that isn’t in any way secret, certainly Google has a copy already, so all I seem to be doing is ensuring that if advertisers want my data, they’ve got to buy it from Google and not my phone company.
For 200 years the courts have had the constitutional right to issue a search warrant and have it obeyed, even if it meant breaking into the premises. It is important to figure out how this translates into the digital age. I’m not satisfied with the “we can’t/we won’t” attitude on the part of Apple and other so-called “privacy advocates”. The industry needs to find a technical solution that does not give criminality the upper hand, or I will support laws to make them.
Are you fucking real…or just an FBI plant? Who in their right mind thinks Apples biz model depends on sales to miscreants? They sell to you and me and to over a billion folks on earth. Those folks want to know their private lives are kept that way. Do you lock the front door on your house? Sure you do. Does that mean you are a miscreant with criminal stuff to hide in your home? No. It means its your home and you want it to stay that way.
As for Judges and warrants Apple was not a suspect in this case and no Judge ordered a warrant for search of anything Apple. The warrant said the FBI could look in the phone. Apple said it did not want to help them do it. Again how about that lock on your door. Do you think the builder of your home should help the cops into in? Or to be ordered to do so? A Judge can authorize the search, within 4th Amendment limits, of your home. But they can’t order the folks that built that home to force entry into it.
You can support all the authoritarian laws you want. But in time you too will be the victim of them. You mention the Constitution ( It takes an upper case C ). Try reading it. Its central idea is antithetical to the one you use to base your authoritarian comments. Try this…read the damn document. Then read it again.
The problem with your position is at least threefold. First, the solution the FBI seeks would provide them with access to EVERY IPhone - not just the one for which they have a warrant, We know our FBI,CIA, NSA and other alphabet organizations have exceeded their lawful authorization and gathered info on millions of American citizens who are accused of no wrongdoing. Even now, they are using the very secretive “Stingray” units to gather ALL of the data from the phones of EVERYONE within a large radius of people they think MIGHT possibly have committed some type of crime - from driving on an expired license on up. The Stingray acts as an imitation cell tower, so any phone within its range is identified, and all the info - that includes phone call, text, contact list, emails sent and received, medical or other data stored on the phone, etc. EVERY piece of information, passwords for your bank and credit card and mortgage and car payment accounts, is being collected, without a warrant and without your knowledge, and without cause. In fact, Law Enforcement is so determined to hide the extent of their illegal use of these machines that they have dropped charges in thousands of cases rather than admit that they used a Stingray - drug, murder, other serious crimes, charges dropped to conceal their unlawful intelligence thefts. Giving them a skeleton key to all IPhones means they would be able to snoop on anyone’s personal info. anytime, without cause or access. Do you really thing the 2 cops recently charged with researching women’s personal data and then using it to extort sexual acts or to force citizens to act as informants are the only 2 who cannot be trusted? I do not need to have something to hide to want to have some level of privacy protection on a device I use for personal and financial activities.
Additionally, the FBI wants Apple to provide them with a system to access ANY IPhone they are interested in. In order to do that, Apple would have to create a “backdoor” that will work to break into EVERY IPhone, and then “push” that hack out to all the phones as an official “Apple signature” encoded “update.” Which means nobody could ever safely update their phone again because it might have the hack in it. It also means that hackers could reverse engineer the upgrade, duplicate the “signature” and access every IPhone just like the FBI. Once the hack is created and authorized with the Apple signature, others will figure it out. Nothing to stop a hacker from sending out an update that tells your phone to automatically text back every password stored on the phone, or bank account info or anything else that could be used to rob you or steal your identity.
Finally, Apple is successful in selling the IPhone because they promise it will keep your data safe from hacking. That is why people buy IPhones instead of other phones. They are being asked to destroy their own business! And pointlessly, since for $2.99 you can buy encryption software that will make the data unreachable, The FBI knows this, and it is one of the reasons Congress refused to pass a law ordering all the manufacturers to provide backdoors to Law Enforcement. THEY understand that the FBI et al are more interested in access than in getting information legally, and they have seen the Snowden materials just like you and I have, And, once OUR government has the backdoor, China and Russia and North Korea and Somalia, etc will demand it too - so there are a lot more issues than “helping to solve a murder.” All the info on the San Bernadino phone was available through other sources. The service provider already gave them the list of calls with times and dates, the texts, etc. Apple gave them the info stored on the ICloud. They said months ago in a leaked email that since Congress would not give them a backdoor law, they would try to get the public to push it as soon as there was a terrorist attack, assuming some people would be willing to give up the tiny bit of privacy they still have, like the “Patriot” Act after 9/11. And Bingo! A terrorist attack as anticipated and some folks indeed offering to give the FBI and co, the last vestiges. Thank goodness at least a few folks in Congress are thinking clearly and not rushing to give the Intelligence folks even more of our lives than they have already taken. And btw, what did they find in the phone after paying a hacker $1.3 million? Nothing. They found that there were no calls or texts that they didn’t already know about. Sheesh.
If you take a document and manually encrypt it and leave a copy on the desk, a search warrant would let the police into your home, but cannot compel you to decrypt it. It would be something they have but cannot read.
In the digital age, there are currently ways to decrypt the equivalent, but have the effect of breaking encryption for everyone else, for everything else. The trade-off is not worth it. There may be a technical solution in the future, but unless that happens, Apple is doing the right thing.