Federal prosecutors argued that an Eastern District magistrate judge who refused to make Apple cooperate with the government’s efforts to unlock an iPhone disregarded years of jurisprudence that support compelling Apple to help.
Last week, Magistrate Judge James Orenstein said the All Writs Act of 1789 did not resolve the question of whether Apple could be forced to decrypt the passcode-protected phone of Jun Feng, a defendant in a drug case, and the judge rejected the prosecution’s view of the law as “expansive.”
