Published in News

FBI uses 18th century law to force decryption

by on03 December 2014



Blame George Washington

The FBI is attempting to use a law which was written by an 18th Century French-backed rebel to force tech companies to decrypt their data. The All Writs Act was penned by George Washington, who had previously trained gangs of armed terrorists to seize power from a democratic government and replace it with a corporate oligarchic form of republicanism.

Washington’s law was enacted in 1789 as part of the Judiciary Act and it is unlikely that he ever thought it would be able to be used to force companies to decrypt information on gadgets. The Act gives the courts the right to issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.

New York prosecutors successfully persuaded a judge that the ancient law could be used to force an unnamed smartphone manufacturer to help unlock a phone allegedly used in a credit card fraud case. The judge ordered the manufacturer to offer "reasonable technical assistance" to make the phone's contents available.

In a second case, in the northern California federal court, prosecutors specifically named Apple in a similar case using the All Writs Act. Coppers said that they were unwilling to try and open the iPhone for fear of damaging a crucial piece of evidence – besides it would have voided the warranty. They asked the courts to force Apple to give them a hand in safely extracting data from the passcode-protected phone.

Apple and Google pointed out that even if they wanted to help the Feds, they can't do anything about it – because modern iOS and Android encrypts data in a way that only the owner can decrypt. The next question is whether this law could be used to force smartphone sellers to include a backdoor or spyware for police, or even a front door as the FBI says it wants.

Given that Washington wrote a lot of his laws so his mates could smuggle stolen goods into the country without being stopped by cops, we would have thought he would have been against such a use of his law.

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