Breaking iPhones Under CALEA and the All Writs Act: Why the Government Was (Mostly) Right

During the investigation of the 2015 San Bernardino shooting, the government asked a district court to order Apple to draft code that would bypass the password protection system of one of the shooters’ iPhones. A number of experts opined that the All Writs Act (AWA) and the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) prohibited the court from issuing the order. This request was preceded by the holding of a New York District Court, which found that those statutes indeed did protect Apple from such compulsion. Although sympathetic to Apple, I argue that those experts and the New York court misinterpreted CALEA, and that the government’s interpretation of that statute was correct. The court’s ultimate ruling in favor of Apple, however, was the right one based on the discretionary factors governing the AWA’s applicability, set forth by the United States Supreme Court in United States v. New York Telephone Co.