It’s pretty tough to get a court order if you don’t get a court involved.
It’s supposted to be impossible to get a court order without a good reason, and “we’re curious” is not a good reason. Does the FBI have anything else?
We don’t know for sure that the suspects acted alone, or at the instruction of or with the collusion of others. The Feds want to break the phone to track down those “others,” if they do indeed exist. This is their job.
What does Eminem think?
I am not sure if you really don’t understand how law enforcement works or if you are trying to make a point here. 14 people were killed by the owner of the phone. Reasons don’t really get much better than that.
Perhaps you are conflating the justification for the specific order the FBI is seeking with the need for the court to be involved. There probably is no legal justification in terms of precedent for the backdoor that the FBI is demanding. That does not mean there is no legal justification for the FBI to access the phone.
“It’s a put on.”
- The Who, Eminence Front
I agree 100%.
That’s the heart of the question, do they need to be connected, or can the court assist in the investigation even if no court case would result?
I’m not sure why you keep referring to the court’s action as “assisting” in the investigation–I suspect it comes down to a confusion about the court’s role in criminal investigations.
Court orders are a normal part of criminal investigations, especially when a party is unwilling to assist the government. Say police want to search a house–they can ask a court for a search warrant, which is a court order authorizing law enforcement to enter and search someone’s home as part of an investigation (even though no formal court case exists yet).
I’m not sure what you mean by “a court case.” Are you referring to criminal charges and trials? Courts hear much more than just those. Here, the “case” is the dispute between Apple and the FBI, which the parties have gone to court to settle (or more specifically, which the FBI has gone to court over).
The court’s role is to insure the investigation is lawful. If police ask for a search warrant, the court is required to ask why, and the police have to give a reason that complies with written law … or they don’t get their search warrant.
Checks and balances …
In this case, the FBI has the phone and the right to search it …
Perhaps we must wait until SCOTUS rules to find our factual answer.
And in this case the district court determined that the government’s reasons were lawful, which is why it issued the order to begin with.
Which is kind of a strange argument, because a cellular phone does not function in some kind of vacuum. All data transfers leave a traceable record of metadata which can be legally subpoenad from the cellular service provider; either SMS/MMS messages to other phones, or data port connections to SMTP, IMAP, or POP3 servers to transfer data. The only way the phone could have connections to data that could not be traces through cellular metadata was if the data were transferred via WiFi or Bluetooth PAN connection, which seems unlikely.
Given that there was no apparent coordination with any other attacks either that day or subsequent,it seems very likely that this was an isolated incident by a pair of self-radicalized individuals that is little different from any other mass shooting. This supposed need to access the phone in order to investigate some presumed connection to a hypothetical ticking bomb scenario is just a rationalization by the Department of Justice to create a precedent to force Apple to comply with future requests to access passcode-protected iOS devices, regardless of how the order may be worded to be exclusive to this phone. Apple is correct in opposing this, although I suspect their motivation is more in protecting the perception that another iPhone hack cannot recur rather than the principle of personal privacy.
Stranger
Supreme Court will rule based on People v. Pena (1985), that ruled that you couldn’t go on a ‘fishing expedition’ without a stated purpose
Uh, what?
Something nobody has discussed - it’s not just “unlock this phone”. It’s “develop a method for allowing us unlimited tries, no waiting on entering the passcode”. This is actually a creative work. Can the state (the court) actually force someone to be creative? What if you think hard and say “it can’t be done”? What if all qualified Apple employees decline to attempt it? (What if Apple hints, since they can’t say, that volunteering for this is a career limiting move?) Can the state force Apple to turn over all proprietary documentation and code to a third party so they can have a go at cracking the code? Can the state compel a qualified person to participate in a code-breaking attempt? Can the state compel someone to violate their conscience simply because of their talent?
But that sword cuts another way.
You cannot vicariously assert another person’s Fourth Amendment rights. What this means is: if the FBI kicks down my door with no warrant, and illegally searches my belongings, there is little doubt the evidence they obtain cannot be used to prosecute me. But if I have pictures of you and me together committing mopery and dopey on a minor, and they find them, they can certainly prosecute you and use those pictures as evidence against you. You can’t assert my Fourth Amendment rights.
In similar fashion, if the phone yields evidence implicating others, those others cannot complain about the FBI invasion of someone else’s phone.
In what court was “People v Pena” decided?
Irrelevant. For the record, it was NY Supreme Court, but either way, a precedent has been set.
Just as if Apple doesn’t unlock the phone, it sets a different precedent which is that corporations don’t have to obey any laws or court orders, effectively ending all corporate liability.
It would be, but it is allowed if the FBI have a stated purpose, i.e. links to other potential/previous crimes, but they won’t be able to get any other information, and they won’t be able to use either the same probable cause info they used to get this warrant, or the data obtained from this warrant (unless it is exactly what the warrant covers, i.e while looking for the names of criminals, they just happen to see some other data they need).
As far as I know, they have consent. The phone is owned by the shooter’s employer (San Bernardino County).