Judge in Different Apple Case Says That All Writs Act Doesn't Mean Apple Needs to Help Feds Break Into Phone

More specifically, the established rules for interpreting a statute's text constrain me to reject the government's interpretation that the AWA empowers a court to grant any relief not outright prohibited by law. Under a more appropriate understanding of the AWA's function as a source of residual authority to issue orders that are "agreeable to the usages and principles of law," 28 U.S.C. § 1651(a), the relief the government seeks is unavailable because Congress has considered legislation that would achieve the same result but has not adopted it. In addition, applicable case law requires me to consider three factors in deciding whether to issue an order under the AWA: the closeness of Apple's relationship to the underlying criminal conduct and government investigation; the burden the requested order would impose on Apple; and the necessity of imposing such a burden on Apple. As explained below, after reviewing the facts in the record and the parties' arguments, I conclude that none of those factors justifies imposing on Apple the obligation to assist the government's investigation against its will. I therefore deny the motion.

I believe Apple has the better argument -- both because it is arguable that CALEA explicitly absolves a company like Apple of any responsibility to provide the assistance the government seeks here and also because even if CALEA does not have such an explicit prohibition, it is part of a larger legislative scheme that is so comprehensive as to imply a prohibition against imposing requirements on private entities such as Apple that the statute does not affirmatively prescribe.

If Apple's retention of intellectual property rights in the software deployed in a device sold to the public sufficed to render it sufficiently close, for purposes of the AWA, to any crime committed by any user of such a device, it would eventually render the first discretionary factor under N.Y. Tel. Co. a dead letter. As constantly increasing computing power is continually squeezed into ever smaller storage devices, the category of consumer products containing licensed software will continue to grow. In a world in which so many devices, not just smartphones, will be connected to the Internet of Things, the government's theory that a licensing agreement allows it to compel the manufacturers of such products to help it surveil the products' users will result in a virtually limitless expansion of the government's legal authority to surreptitiously intrude on personal privacy.