From ComputerWorld: The U.S. Department of Justice has appealed an order by a court in New York that turned down its request that Apple should be compelled to extract data from the iPhone 5s of an alleged drug dealer.
The case in New York is seen as having a bearing on another high-profile case in California. There, Apple is contesting an order that would require the company to assist the FBI, including by providing new software, in its attempts at cracking by brute force the passcode of an iPhone 5c running iOS 9. The phone was used by one of the two terrorists in the San Bernardino killings on Dec. 2, and the FBI wants Apple to disable the auto-erase feature on the phone, which would erase all data after 10 unsuccessful tries of the passcode, if the feature was activated by the terrorist.
The DOJ argues in the New York case as well that it is unable to access the data on the phone running iOS 7, because it is locked with a passcode. By trying repeated passcodes, the government risks permanently losing all access to the contents of the phone because when an iPhone is locked it is not apparent if the auto-erase feature is enabled, according to the filing Monday.
But Apple can help extract the data from the iPhone 5s, which it has done dozens of times in the past for similar iPhone versions at the request of the government, the DOJ argues. For versions of the operating system that predate iOS 8, Apple has the capability to bypass the passcode feature and access the contents of the phone that were unencrypted, it wrote in the filing.
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