Apple rejects request to hack NY drug dealer’s iPhone

“As a preliminary matter, the government has utterly failed to satisfy its burden to demonstrate that Apple’s assistance in this case is necessary,” Apple said in its 45-page filing late today. “The government has made no showing that it has exhausted alternative means for extracting data from the iPhone at issue here.”

The Brooklyn federal court case focuses on Jun Feng, a Queens, N.Y. defendant who pleaded guilty in October to a methamphetamine conspiracy. Authorities indicated they sought access to his iPhone 5 in a bid to investigate other aspects of the alleged plot, including whether others, not yet known to the government, may have been involved.

The Justice Department has argued Apple is only refusing because the situation has been made public.

“Apple expressly agreed to assist the government in accessing the data on this iPhone — as it has at least 70 times before in similar circumstances — and only changed course when the government’s application for assistance was made public by the court,” Justice Department spokeswoman Emily Pierce said in a statement. “Indeed, Apple has said it would take them only a few hours to open this kind of phone, because they already have mechanism that would allow them to do so.”

A dispute between the U.S. government and Apple over how far it should go in helping authorities circumvent built-in security features on its devices has shifted to the New York iPhone case, after the government abruptly dropped a similar legal challenge in California. Some argue the New York drug case could become a litmus test for hundreds of other cases law enforcement officials are pursuing against Apple and other smartphone makers over device encryption.

In the more high-profile California case, Apple fought the DOJ in court and in the public eye as it tried to refuse the FBI’s request that to override its own passcode software. The U.S. government dropped the case last month after the FBI said it was able to view the contents of an iPhone used by San Bernardino terrorist Syed Farook with help of an undisclosed outside party.

In the New York drug dealer’s case, the government is appealing Magistrate Judge Orenstein’s ruling in March that denied a DOJ request for a court order that would have forced Apple to bypass the security passcode on the iPhone of the drug trafficker.

The Department of Justice appealed the ruling to Brooklyn U.S. District Judge Margo Brodie, noting that Apple had complied with similar requests in dozens of previous cases.

Federal prosecutors argued the Constitution permits reasonable searches, including those where the government has a warrant.

Article Appeared @http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/04/15/apple-rejects-latest-doj-request-extract-iphone-data/83080780/

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