Apple, Justice Dept. at odds over convicted drug dealer’s iPhone

Despite obtaining a guilty plea last week from a man accused of felony drug crimes, Justice Department attorneys are asking Apple for assistance cracking into the man’s password-protected iPhone.

The seemingly impenetrable smartphone at the center of the case against Jun Feng has created a rift between federal investigators and Silicon Valley after attorneys for the U.S. government said Apple’s help was required to access evidence on the man’s phone.

But even after Feng pleaded guilty Thursday, Justice attorneys said Apple’s assistance is required nonetheless since the contents of the phone were sought with a search warrant relevant to an ongoing investigation.

“This matter is not moot because a federal court has issued a search warrant, based upon probable cause, authorizing law enforcement to seize evidence of narcotics offenses that is stored on the Target Phone, and that search warrant still cannot be executed without the relief sought in the pending application,” U.S. Attorney Robert L. Capers wrote Friday. “Feng pleaded guilty to a narcotics conspiracy, and the government’s investigation into that conspiracy is ongoing. The underlying search warrant authorizes the government to seize evidence relating to Feng ’and others,’ including ’customers’ and ’sources of drugs.’

“The government still seeks to obtain that evidence,” Mr. Capers wrote, adding that the matter “remains ongoing until sentencing and judgment is entered in the case.”

Apple argued that forcing it to extract data, “absent clear legal authority to do so,” could threaten consumer trust and “substantially tarnish the Apple brand.”

The case has encapsulated the federal government’s struggle against widespread and easy-to-use encryption, the likes of which investigators said has hindered numerous law-enforcement efforts in the months since Apple’s rollout last year of features which protects data with strong crypto by default.

“There are billions of messages a day that get transmitted that are effectively warrant proof. There’s millions and millions of devices out there that come out of the box effectively warrant proof,” Kiran Raj, the senior counsel to the Justice Department’s deputy attorney general, said in September. “Even if we have a warrant, it’s a brick to us.”