14 DAY TRIAL // The United States Department of Justice is not willing to back down in the dispute against Apple over an iPhone used by San Bernardino terrorists in the December 2015 attacks, and in the latest response, it accuses the company of “false statements.”
In the official documents, the US DOJ says that Apple has increased security of the iPhone “deliberately” in order to make it harder to break into by the FBI, which now makes it impossible to access “evidence related to the terrorist mass murder of 14 Americans.”
The message is clearly supposed to be a little emotional and make Apple be the bad guy, so the DOJ also responded to the company’s accusations that it would have to assign engineers who worked to make iPhones more secure to the task of hacking their own products.
“By Apple’s own reckoning, the corporation — which grosses hundreds of billions of dollars a year — would need to set aside as few of six of its 100,000 employees for as little as two weeks,” the DOJ said.
“Apple’s rhetoric is not only false, but also corrosive of the very institutions that are best able to safeguard our liberty and our rights: the courts, the Fourth Amendment, longstanding precedent and venerable laws, and the democratically elected branches of government.”
Apple: This is a cheap shot
Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell has already issued a public response to this statement, explaining that FBI’s new filing is just “a cheap shot” and that it “reads like an indictment.”
“In 30 years of practice I don’t think I’ve seen a legal brief that was more intended to smear the other side with false accusations and innuendo, and less intended to focus on the real merits of the case. We would never respond in kind, but imagine Apple asking a court whether the FBI could be trusted because ‘there is a real question about whether J Edgar Hoover ordered the assignation of Kennedy’ see conspiracytheory.com as our evidence,” he said, adding that the FBI is clearly “desperate.”
At this point, it’s very obvious that neither side wants to back down, so the dispute will be moved to the federal court on March 22. Apple can issue a formal reply to the DOJ by March 15.