Apple vs FBI- Battle Continues

Apple vs FBI battle seems to be raging every passing day. Many other players have joined the fray taking either side. When Warren Buffet thinks that national security comes before privacy, big names like Facebook and Google are rallying behind Apple’s argument that they stand for privacy and safety of its users first. According to them, Calfornia’s court orders for Apple to break its encryption for FBI could set in a dangerous precedent.

Apple also got a boost to its case on Monday when in a drug case hearing in New York, a federal magistrate judge rejected the U.S. government’s request to force the company to help it extract data from a locked iPhone of Jun Feng, who pleaded guilty in October to drug charges. According to magistrate James Orenstein if courts continue to grant orders to the Justice Department in these cases, the result will be "a virtually limitless expansion of the government's legal authority to surreptitiously intrude on personal privacy."

The US Justice Department has sought court orders to force Apple to extract data from 15 devices in the past four months, beginning with a case in Brooklyn in which Apple declined to cooperate with investigators in October. The highly publicized present debate pertains to iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters which FBI wants Apple Inc to unlock for them. And Apple has clearly refused to comply. For the company its betraying the customer trust.

Tim Cook in a written message to people said that the government’s orders have “implications far beyond the legal case at hand’. For Cook it is breach of trust to put his customers at risk and that he cannot allow FBI a backdoor entry into their operating system.

Apple has said that it fully cooperated with FBI in the immediate aftermath of the event but cannot comply with their present demand of letting the bureau bypass the encryption. In its congressional statement Apple said “The FBI is asking Apple to weaken the security of our products. Hackers and cyber criminals could use this to wreak havoc on our privacy and personal safety. It would set a dangerous precedent for government intrusion on the privacy and safety of its citizens.”

The request to compel Apple to provide information on the iPhone relies on an expanded interpretation of the All Writs Act (AWA) — which is currently being used to try to force Apple to unlock an iPhone in San Bernardino case. The All Writs Act is a United States federal statute, which authorizes the United States federal courts to "issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law."