EFF in the News
Jeremy Gillula, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the move is puzzling since Amazon uses a modified version of Android's operating system for its Fire OS, so encryption was likely built into the Android system.
"It's concerning from a security point of view," he said. "If you lose your tablet or your tablet is stolen, any data that's stored is readable."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation was pleased by the decision, EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn said, noting that the operating system involved in the New York case is an older version than the phone at issue in the San Bernardino attack.
"The judge decided that federal agents can't try to get a court to do something that Congress has considered but not allowed the government to demand -- specifically that companies like Apple do not have to help the government bypass the security they have built into devices," she told TechNewsWorld.
The court rejected the argument that the government is only seeking Apple's compliance on one device, Cohn noted, citing a statement in the decision that "the burdens the government seeks to impose on Apple under the authority of the All Writs Act are not nearly so limited."
A dozen other cases with similar demands are pending in federal courts across the country, she added.
Code is written primarily to communicate to machines. Andrew Crocker, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, compares source code to other technical forms of communication like sheet music or mathematical equations.
"Programmers write code to have computers do things, but other people can read that code, because it has comments in it," said Crocker, whose foundation filed court papers to support Apple. "Just because you and I don't understand it doesn't mean there aren't some people who do. Programmers will tell you there is a right way to write code: There's cool code and elegant code. It's a form of communication separate from or alongside form the instructions for the computer."
“Magistrate judges don’t write 50-page orders for all of their warrants,” Andrew Crocker, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me. “This is clearly one where the judge knew there would be a lot of attention paid to it, whether that’s for an appeal, or for the public, or both.”
“Brazilian local courts have had a long history of issuing such broad and disruptive injunctions in their attempts to force Internet intermediaries to comply with state investigations or orders,” says Electronic Frontier Foundation International Rights Director Katitza Rodriguez, in an email to the Monitor.
“This is one more in a trend, especially against a company, WhatsApp, that does not have boots on the ground, and against an executive of Facebook, which owns WhatsApp and is a separate legal entity.”
In a series of court battles in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Cindy Cohn represented plaintiffs challenging restrictions on DVD copying and the publication of cryptographic code. In all three cases—Bernstein v. United States, Universal City Studios v. Reimerdes, and Junger v. Daley—federal courts held that computer code merited protection under the First Amendment.
Apple repeatedly pointed to this precedent in its motion last Friday to vacate a ruling ordering it to help the FBI unlock the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters.
...Cohn, now the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, endorsed Apple's repeated citations of her cases. But she said that the controversial iPhone-unlocking order impinged even further on Apple's free-speech rights than the restrictions in her cases.
Code is written primarily to communicate to machines. Andrew Crocker, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, compares source code to other technical forms of communication like sheet music or mathematical equations.
"Programmers write code to have computers do things, but other people can read that code, because it has comments in it," said Crocker, whose foundation filed court papers to support Apple. "Just because you and I don't understand it doesn't mean there aren't some people who do. Programmers will tell you there is a right way to write code: There's cool code and elegant code. It's a form of communication separate from or alongside form the instructions for the computer."
"Magistrate judges are uniquely positioned to see this increasing use of technology by law enforcement," said Andrew Crocker, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit privacy organization. "They're on the front lines, and they're asking questions."
Radio guests:
Kim Zetter, senior staff reporter at WIRED, covering cybercrime, privacy and security. (@KimZetter)
Michael Hayden, principal at the Chertoff Group, a security consultancy. Retired Air Force general and former director of the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency. Author of the new book, “Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror.” (@GenMhayden)
James Lewis, former government official who writes on cyber security and warfare at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. (@james_a_lewis)
Nate Cardozo, staff attorney on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s digital civil liberties team. (@ncardozo)
Amazon, LinkedIn, Twitter, the Mozilla Foundation, and the cloud storage firm Box, along with advocacy groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology, are also expected to support Apple.
eff.org/nsa-spying
