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Comment by rewrew | Hacker News Reader

Last week the former US "cyber czar" Richard Clarke called the FBI out directly for doing it solely for legal precedent, and stated that virtually no one even in the gov't were on their side: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/former-cyber-czar... >>Clarke noted that Comey and the Justice Department were not getting support in their case from the defense and intelligence communities. "The Justice Department and the FBI are on their own here," he said. "The FBI director [Comey] is exaggerating the need for this, and the Attorney General [Loretta Lynch] is letting him get away with it."<<

But the weird thing is that, from the beginning, most legal experts thought the likely outcome would be that All Writs would be found too broad, so the FBI had to have been suffering from some hubris + bad legal council. So maybe someone with enough muscle finally called them out on it?

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I find it more likely that this is simply a tactical decision: they already knew about this "new method", and were holding it in reserve so that they could cancel the proceedings if necessary (i.e., if Apple put up too much of a fight). They will keep trying until they get the precedent.

> They will keep trying until they get the precedent.

Don't they already have a precedent when they shut down Truecrypt some years ago?

Truecrypt is still active in the sense that it is both something that can be downloaded and the last security audit showed that there aren't any major flaws. Are you referring to a different service, perhaps?

I don't remember the FBI being involved with TrueCrypt at all, but I don't know.

There was a case where the FBI wanted to force someone to divulge his (I think) TrueCrypt keys, which was found to be a fifth amendment issue, in favor of the defendant.

There's no known precedent for the use of the All Writs Act in the manner the FBI attempted to use it this time:

https://www.apple.com/pr/pdf/32_Law_Professors.pdf

"No court has ever issued a valid order that imposes an equivalent burden on a non-party. Our research has not found any case that uses the All Writs Act to require a third-party private entity to design and create new software. Some courts have compelled disclosure of already-existing information in cases where the All Writs Act is found applicable. In contrast, the order the government demands in this case would require substantial expenditures of time and talent above and beyond what is appropriate under the All Writs Act. This point is particularly alarming where Apple has made a deliberate decision to exclude the features that the government now demands."

Or forget about precedent and just go to Congress:

http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/273482-senate-intel-...

And:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11288030

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