Professor Crawford claims the FBI Cannot Make Apple Rewrite Its OS
Susan Crawford, Harvard Law Professor and former Obama Special Assistant posts on her column at Backchannel:
Barack Obama has a fine legal mind. But he may not have been using it when he talked about encryption last week. […] The problem for the president is that when it comes to the specific battle going on right now between Apple and the FBI, the law is clear: twenty years ago, Congress passed a statute, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) that does not allow the government to tell manufacturers how to design or configure a phone or software used by that phone — including security software used by that phone.
Is she correct? I hope so. I have never hid my dislike of Apple products and never will. However, I am completely on the side of Apple here. If they lose this case it will have very wide and far reaching impacts in all of our lives.