Apple CEO Tim Cook Opposes Court Order to allow Govt. Acess to it's iOS devices

[MaDef]

Originally Posted by Gargamel

Well, Appple has filed an appeal based on the first and fifth amendments. I think that everybody (not just here lol) needs to wait for the upper courts to decide this. I'm sure Apple will comply with whatever ruling is eventually handed out.

To me, this is a landmark case, and will decide personal security issues for many many years to come.

I would think this problem would fall under the 4th. since apple isn't being accused of a crime (as far as I can tell) so the 5th shouldn't be in play. Nor am I sure where the 1st comes into play in this instance.

As I see it, the Federal Gov. is trying to force compliance from apple to cover their mistake of not using the mobile data management tool that should already have been in place, and they are using the "in the interest of national security" excuse to do it. Question is, if they can force Apple to cooperate, what's to stop them from forcing another company or individuals to comply with these type of requests.

[Gargamel]

I had the article at lunch, so I may be wrong on the amendments, you may be right.

I believe it was BBC article, lemme see if I can dig it up.

Here's part of it, must have been an engadget article I read about the 4th/5th . http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35664904

Apple has argued that the FBI's request violates its constitutional right to freedom of speech, because a 1999 court case ruled that computer code is considered speech

A side note, I just bought a Western Digital 1tb external USB drive to backup my main machine. I've always had multiple internal drives for this purpose (my last desktop machine had 5 physical HDD's). With the amount of work I've been doing in 3d design, a lot of my files are irreplaceable if the HDD fails on this laptop. WD always has pretty good software that comes with their drives, and this one has a password lock on it. It's tied to my logon account, so if it sees this machine and my account, it automatically unlocks. But If not, it requires a password to unlock the drive. But the setup CLEARLY states that in no way will WD be able to retrieve a lost password or data. I doubt the data is encrypted, so a physical manual retrieval of the data bit by bit would be possible. Made me think of this dilemma.

[MaDef]

It seems Apple is using the 1st amendment as an argument, however if they're citing Bernstein v. United States as the basis for the challenge then I'm missing the correlation. Bernstein v. United States was about the Gov. preventing a person from making public HIS encryption algorithm. This case is similar but is about the Gov. forcing a person to produce something that as far as we know doesn't exist.

I'm not a constitutional scholar, or even a lawyer, but it seems to me that Apple would have better luck (at least in this instance) to use the 10th amendment as the basis for a challenge.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Doing so would actually take the focus from this one incident (and I sympathize with the Gov. on this, since it is their phone) and raise the more pertinent question of, "how much power do we want our Gov. to acquire vs. our individual rights?"

[Platapus]

The 9th and 10 amendment have not meant much for way too long time. They are the "forgotten" amendments it seems.

[Gargamel]

Well here's a new twist, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-35692931

A judge in the United States has ruled that Apple cannot be forced to give the FBI access to a locked iPhone in a case that echoes an ongoing legal battle.

While a different case, it's the opposite ruling as to the one that has gained all the attention. And while the California court does not have to abide by this ruling, it pretty much guarantees battles in the higher courts.