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 The rare display of unity and support from Apple's sometime-rivals
showed the breadth of Silicon Valley's opposition to the
government's anti-encryption effort, a position endorsed by the
United Nations human rights chief.
Apple's battle became public last month when the Federal Bureau of
Investigation obtained a court order requiring the company to write
new software to disable passcode protection and allow access to an
iPhone used by one of the shooters in the December killings in San
Bernardino, California.
Apple pushed back, arguing that such a move would set a dangerous
precedent and threaten customer security, and asked that the order
be vacated. The clash has intensified a long-running debate over how
much law enforcement and intelligence officials should be able to
monitor digital communications.
Apple's industry allies, along with several privacy advocates, filed
amicus briefs - a form of comment from outside groups common in
complex cases - to U.S. District Judge Sheri Pym, in Riverside,
California, who had set a Thursday deadline.
Six relatives of San Bernardino attack victims on Thursday weighed
in with their own amicus brief opposing Apple. Three California law
enforcement groups, three federal law enforcement groups and the San
Bernardino district attorney also filed in favor of the government.
 The companies backing Apple largely echo the iPhone maker's main
argument, that the 1789 All Writs Act at the heart of the
government's case cannot be used to force companies to create new
technology.
One amicus filing, from a group of 17 Internet companies including
Twitter Inc <TWTR.N> and LinkedIn Corp <LNKD.N>, asserted that
Congress has already passed laws that establish what companies could
be obliged to do for the government, and that the court case
amounted to an "end run" around those laws.
Apple, and some of the other briefs, did not go quite that far, but
also asserted that Congress, not the courts, needed to address the
issue. Congress has struggled without success for years to address
law-enforcement concerns about encryption.
The victims' families argued that Apple's arguments were misplaced
because the government had a valid warrant, and "one does not enjoy
the privacy to commit a crime." The families also asserted that
Apple "routinely modifies its systems" to comply with Chinese
government directives.
Apple has also advanced a free speech argument, on the grounds that
computer code is a form of expression and cannot be coerced. The
families pushed back against that defense: "This is the electronic
equivalent of unlocking a door - no expression is involved at all,"
they said.
The San Bernardino District Attorney's summary argument, contained
in its application to file an amicus brief, alleges the iPhone might
have been "used as a weapon to introduce a lying dormant cyber
pathogen that endangers San Bernardino County's infrastructure." The
court document contained no evidence to support the claim.
Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights,
urged U.S. authorities to proceed with "great caution", warning: "A
successful case against Apple in the U.S. will set a precedent that
may make it impossible for Apple or any other major international IT
company to safeguard their clients' privacy anywhere in the world.”
"It is potentially a gift to authoritarian regimes, as well as to
criminal hackers," he said in a statement.
TWO BIG COALITIONS
The tech and Internet industries largely coalesced around two
filings. One includes market leaders Google, Microsoft, Facebook,
Amazon.com <AMZN.O> and Cisco Systems <CSCO.O>, along with smaller,
younger companies such as Mozilla, Snapchat, Slack and Dropbox.
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That group noted that Congress passed the All Writs Act more than
200 years ago, and said the Justice Department's effort to use the
law to force engineers to disable security protections relies on a
"boundless" interpretation of the law that is not supported by any
precedent.
The brief also advanced constitutional arguments, saying the order
violated free speech, the separation of power and due process.
The second industry coalition, which includes Twitter, eBay Inc
<EBAY.O> and LinkedIn, contended in its filing that the
Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) of 1994,
along with other statutes, has already made it clear what the
companies could or could not be forced to do.
CALEA requires telephone companies to allow interception of
communications, but notably excludes "information service" companies
from such mandates. Apple said it was rightly considered an
information company in this context.
AT&T's filing, by contrast, called for a "new legislation solution"
that "applies equally to all holders of personal information," an
apparent reference to the exemption for information providers in
CALEA.
Semiconductor maker Intel Corp <INTC.O> filed a brief of its own in
support of Apple.
"We believe that tech companies need to have the ability to build
and design their products as needed, and that means that we can't
have the government mandating how we build and design our products,"
Chris Young, senior vice president and general manager for the
company's Intel Security Group, said in an interview.
The Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society filed a
separate brief on Thursday on behalf of a group of well-known
experts on iPhone security and encryption, including Charlie Miller,
Dino Dai Zovi, Bruce Schneier and Jonathan Zdziarski.
Privacy advocacy groups the American Civil Liberties Union, Access
Now and the Wickr Foundation filed briefs on Wednesday in support of
Apple.
Salihin Kondoker, whose wife, Anies Kondoker, was injured in the San
Bernardino attack, also wrote on Apple's behalf, saying he shared
the company's fear that the software the government wants Apple to
create to unlock the phone could be used to break into millions of
other phones.
Law enforcement officials have said that Rizwan Farook and his wife,
Tashfeen Malik, were inspired by Islamist militants when they shot
and killed 14 people and wounded 22 others on Dec. 2 at a holiday
party in San Bernardino. Farook and Malik were later killed in a
shootout with police, and the FBI said it wants to read the data on
Farook's work phone to investigate any links with militant groups.
Earlier this week, a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled that the
government had overstepped its authority by seeking similar
assistance from Apple in a drug case.
(Reporting by Jim Finkle in Boston and Dustin Volz in San Francisco;
Additional reporting by Dan Levine, Heather Somerville, Sarah
McBride, Julia Love in San Francisco and Stephanie Nebehay in
Geneva; Editing by Jonathan Weber, Grant McCool, Bill Rigby, Richard
Chang and Leslie Adler)
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