The US Department of Justice just responded to Apple in the ongoing court battle over what Apple must do to help the FBI unlock an iPhone — and the response is a 43-page document with an argument that can be summarised as “Apple is being a baby”.
The DOJ argues that All Writs is an acceptable statute to use in the case, and says that Apple can easily spare employees and resources to create code that will help officials unlock the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters. Motherboard’s Adrienne Jeffries highlighted this eye roll of a passage from the DOJ response, detailing just how easy unlocking the phone would be:
By Apple’s own reckoning, the corporation — which grosses billions of dollars a year — would need to set aside as few as six of its 100,000 employees for perhaps as little as two weeks. This burden, which is not unreasonable, is the direct result of Apple’s deliberate marketing decision to engineer its products so that the government cannot search them, even without a warrant.
Apple’s security measures, like its move to increase encryption on newer phones, are characterised as deliberate impediments to law enforcement :
Apple deliberately raised technological barriers that now stand between a lawful warrant and an iPhone containing evidence related to the terrorist mass murder of 14 Americans
You can read the entire response here: