Facebook, Google, AT&T back Apple in FBI fight
SAN FRANCISCO — A wave of tech companies that include the industry's biggest names filed court statements backing Apple in its battle with the federal government over access to a killer's iPhone.
Twitter was one of 17 allied tech firms filing a federal court amicus brief Thursday, a group that includes Airbnb, LinkedIn and eBay. AT&T and Intel each did the same, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and 46 technologists, researchers and cryptographers.
A second coalition that grouped 15 mature tech companies with younger start-ups — including Google, Facebook, Amazon, Cisco, Microsoft, Mozilla, Snapchat, Box, Slack and Yahoo — also filed in support of Apple, urging the court to exercise caution in applying a legal decision from an era when cell phones and the Internet were unheard of.
"(The government request) is an overreach, it is asking a tech company to undermine years of security," Mozilla chief legal officer Denelle Dixon-Thayer told USA TODAY.
Apple is getting broad tech world support for its refusal to comply with an order from a judge in California who said Apple should help the FBI unlock an iPhone used by one of the killers in the San Bernardino mass shooting in December. Apple says writing new software to override encryption on that particular iPhone would create an digital opening into countless other iPhones that other governments and criminals could exploit.
USA TODAY
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Among the various groups filing briefs is an assemblage of top iPhone hacking talent, including former National Security Agency crypto expert Charlie Miller. They argue that if the FBI wins this case, it could later demand that a broad spectrum of companies be forced to push software updates out to users’ devices, from TVs to phones.
The individual and group filings from the tech companies argue that the FBI's request is broad overreach of the government's mandate.
"This case isn’t simply about letting the FBI pick the lock to a dead terrorist’s phone. It’s about whether governments can conscript private companies to disable security features built into their devices," said Ron Bell, general counsel at Yahoo.
And that type of action — compelling a company to write software code it wouldn't otherwise — raises "serious First Amendment problems", read the brief from the Google-Facebook-Yahoo coalition.
"Those new versions would not be the same product anymore. Snapchat would not be Snapchat; Box would not be Box; Gmail would not Gmail; WhatsApp would not be WhatsApp; and so on," read the brief.
Apple set up a page on its website that lists those supporting its position. The case is conspicuously being played out in the public eye, which has led some observers — and even some supporters — to suggest that the better course of action is to broker an agreement in private.
"The rhetoric has exceeded the reality," Autodesk CEO Carl Bass told USA TODAY last week. "They need to settle the immediate case, and then people can be more rational."
Autodesk is part of the Business Software Alliance, which includes companies such as Salesforce, Oracle and IBM. It filed a brief along with big trade groups such as the Consumer Technology Association, which puts on the annual Consumer Electronics Show, and the Information Technology Industry Council.