Apple’s yearlong road toward legal standoff with FBI

Feds surprised when company drew battle line over suspect’s cellphone

WASHINGTON — Time and again after the introduction of the iPhone nearly a decade ago, the Justice Department asked Apple for help opening a locked phone. And nearly without fail, the company agreed.

Then last fall, the company changed its mind. In a routine drug case in a Brooklyn federal court, prosecutors sought a court order demanding that Apple unlock a methamphetamine dealer’s iPhone 5s running old, easy-to-unlock software. The company acknowledged that it could open the phone, as it had before. But this time, it pushed back.

“We’re being forced to become an agent of law enforcement,” the company’s lawyer, Marc Zwillinger, protested in court.

That stance foreshadowed this week’s showdown between the Obama administration and Apple over the locked iPhone belonging to one of the suspects in the San Bernardino shooting rampage. By the time of Zwillinger’s statement, Apple and the government had been at odds for more than a year, since the debut of Apple’s new encrypted operating system, iOS 8, in late 2014.

The new technology repeatedly stymied investigators — the New York authorities said on Thursday that they had been locked out of 175 iPhones in cases they were pursuing. But both sides held out hope for a compromise that would avoid the type of confrontation that emerged this week when a federal magistrate judge ordered Apple to comply with the Justice Department’s request.

With last October’s court filing, the confrontation became all but inevitable. The company left no doubt that it would fight any effort to crack its new, encrypted phones.

Apple’s stance that day in Brooklyn caught the Justice Department off guard. In the first half of 2015 alone, the company provided data in response to more than 3,000 law enforcement requests, Apple said. Company lawyers gave prosecutors no indication that the drug case against Jun Feng would be any different.

But Zwillinger said the drug case would be Apple’s line in the sand. “Customer data is under siege from a variety of different directions,” he said. “Never has the privacy and security of customer data been as important as it is now.”

It was a delicate period for the Obama administration, which was focused on finding a way to break into the new encrypted iPhones. The FBI, in particular, was lobbying hard to win support for that idea in the face of skepticism from Silicon Valley, Congress and the public.

Timothy Cook, Apple’s chief executive, described data privacy as a human rights issue. Backed by l eading technologists, Cook argued that if the company designed a way to defeat encryption for the United States government, that tool would be exploit- ed by hackers or foreign governments like China.

Under Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., the Justice Department was sympathetic to that point of view, even in the face of an aggressive campaign from the FBI director, James B. Comey. Holder f avored meeting with technology executives in the hope of finding common ground.

Others in the department strongly disagreed. National security officials argued that, with the introduction of the encrypted iOS 8, Apple (along with Google, which had started its own encrypted Android phone software) had made thumbing its nose at the government a business strategy.

Local law enforcement officials, too, were sounding alarms.

“This has become, ladies and gentlemen, the Wild West in technology,” Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the dis- trict attorney in Manhattan, said at a news conference Thursday. “Apple and Google are their own sheriffs. There are no rules.”

By the time of the Feng case, 90 percent of Apple devices were running iOS 8 or newer versions. The FBI warned that it was only a matter of time before its agents were locked out of a phone in a case with lives at stake.

The San Bernardino, Calif., attacks, which killed 14 people, presented the FBI with a seemingly perfect test case. This week, the Justice Department got its wish when Apple was ordered to override its defenses and build a tool that does not yet exist.