If you can't trust any part of the government, the Fourth Amendment is immaterial: you can't trust the entity to whom is entrusted the power to adjudicate reasonableness.
The court is compelling a third party to perform an act that really isn't part of a search and seizure of items.
Search and Seizure as defined by 4A is over and done with. The Prosecution has searched the "places to be searched" and is in possession of the "persons or things to be seized."
Now can it compel Apple to make them useful? (Potentially useful, as even the State has argued there likely isn't really any useful evidence there anyway.. sorta makes this whole thing look like a dog and pony show.)
Either way, Congress isn't a check on the Supreme Court. It's typically rather the other way around.
The Supreme Court isn't a factor at this stage.
"Typically" you are correct. The formal method for checking the power of the Judiciary is for Congress to remove Judges from the bench.
Apple is arguing that All Writs doesn't grant the authority that is being used. If that authority is to be sought then it will have to come from Congress. At least one Judge agrees.
Creation of new works is just such a limit.
If there is not a limit, then what the courts may compel as "assistance" becomes absurd.
This is the argument Apple is making and it is the foundation of the opinion of at least one Judge that has ruled against use of the AWA to compel the unlocking of a phone.
E.g. If I was ordered to produce logs that may be evidence in a case, and I only had and only produced a 10GB+ text log with a single line the warrant was interested in. Can a warrant order me to parse the log to find the relevant information?
Furthermore, at what point does a digital space become similar to a physical space? When I can carry 3 hard drives that can contain almost as much information as the Library of Congress print collections, is it reasonable to think of them as "one thing" for legal purposes? In that if you have access to the physical container, you have access to all its contents?
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-lavabit-melted-do...
What I do think is that people who are intimately involved with new technologies will tend to believe that the complexities of their technologies must somehow swamp the Constitution.
No, its not the technologists who don't get it.
Anyway to the point: we need to clarify if searching my house, and searching my person, and searching my laptop, and searching my cloud-based email history are in the same class. Hell, even searching my breath or blood isn't protected like they should be. Its a long way from clear, what Constitutional protections are extended to modern situation and which aren't. Technology has challenged everything we thought we knew.