Apple today filed a motion to vacate U.S. Justice Department attorneys’ order to compel the tech company to help the FBI unlock the iPhone 5c that belonged to San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook.
The attorneys filed the 35-page motion in the U.S. District Court’s Central District of California on February 19. Now, less than 24 hours after Apple chief executive Tim Cook made public comments on television on how the demand for Apple to break the iPhone’s encryption would be “bad for America,” the company has submitted its legal response.
Today’s 47-page filing hits on several of the points Cook said on TV and wrote in his letter to customers the previous week, including that this case affects public safety and isn’t only about national security vs. privacy, that the desired software could be used on multiple phones, not just Farook’s iPhone, and that the government has “cut off debate” by beginning this battle “behind closed doors” instead of in Congress. However, the filing begins very strongly by saying that “the Constitutions forbids” what the government is asking for.
In fact fulfilling what the government desires would “require Apple to create full-time positions in a new ‘hacking’ department,” the company says.
“Although it is difficult to estimate, because it's never been done before, the decision, creation, validation, and deployment of the software likely would necessitate six to ten Apple engineers and employees dedicating a very substantial portion of their time for a minimum of two weeks, and likely as several as four weeks,” Apple said. “Members of the team would include engineers from Apple’s core operating system group, a quality assurance engineer, a product manager, and either a document writer or a tool writer.”
Rather than use the “FBiOS” shortcut that has arisen in recent days Apple used instead what the government wants “GovtOS.”
In saying what the government wants is not legal, Apple is specifically citing the First and Fifth amendments in its motion to vacate.
Our timeline of the case is here.
Harrison Weber contributed to this report.
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