Tech industry leaders including Alphabet Inc’s Google, Facebook Inc, Microsoft Corp, AT&T and more than two dozen other Internet and technology companies filed legal briefs on Thursday asking a judge to support Apple Inc in its encryption battle with the U.S. government.
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.
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One amicus filing, from a group of 17 Internet companies including Twitter Inc and LinkedIn Corp, 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.
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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 and Cisco Systems, along with smaller, younger companies such as Mozilla, Snapchat, Slack and Dropbox.
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 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.