BY DUSTIN VOLZ
Apple Inc (AAPL.O) has been asked by Chinese
authorities within the last two years to hand over its source code but refused,
the company's top lawyer told lawmakers on Tuesday in response to U.S. law
enforcement criticism of its stance on technology security.
The
congressional testimony highlighted an issue at the heart of a heated
disagreement between Apple and the FBI over unlocking encrypted data from an
iPhone linked to last December's San Bernardino, California shootings - how
much private technology companies should cooperate with governments.
Law
enforcement officials have attempted to portray Apple as possibly complicit in
handing over information to China's government for business reasons while
refusing to cooperate with U.S. requests for access to private data in criminal
cases.
"I
want to be very clear on this," Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell told
Tuesday's hearing under oath. "We have not provided source code to the
Chinese government."
Apple has
previously denied the accusation as a "smear" originating from the
U.S. Department of Justice's effort to force Apple to help unlock the iPhone 5c
used by one of the two San Bernardino killers, who were inspired by Islamist
militants.
The claim
resurfaced in the hearing called by a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee to
examine potential common ground between law enforcement and the technology
sector in the encryption debate, though more than three hours of testimony
yielded little clear agreement.
Captain
Charles Cohen, commander in the Indiana State Police, repeated the suggestion
that Apple has quietly cooperated with Beijing, which strictly regulates
technology in exchange for access to its market.
But when
pressed by Representative Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat, for the source of
that claim, Cohen only cited news reports.
“That
takes my breath away," a visibly frustrated Eshoo said. "That is a
huge allegation.”
The
Justice Department had argued in the San Bernardino case that it would be
willing to demand Apple turn over source code that underlies its products,
though at the time it only sought the company's cooperation in writing new
software that would disable the passcode protections on the phone.
Technology
and security experts have said that if the U.S. government was able to obtain
Apple's source code with a conventional court order, other governments would
demand equal rights to do the same thing.
After
winning a court order in February, the Federal Bureau of Investigation dropped
its case against Apple last month when it said it had found a third party
entity to help investigators hack into the iPhone used by gunman Rizwan Farook.
On
Tuesday, Apple and the FBI were making a second appearance in Congress since
March to testify over law enforcement access to encrypted devices, a
decades-old dispute between Silicon Valley and Washington that gained renewed
life from the San Bernardino case.
While that
standoff underscored national security concerns posed by advances in technology
security, the growing use of strong default encryption on mobile devices and
communications by criminal suspects is handicapping investigators' ability to
pursue routine cases, law enforcement officials told the hearing. Apple and
other companies defend the technology as integral to protecting consumers.
The FBI
relies heavily on the "services and specialized skills that we can only
get through the private industry, and that partnership is critical to our
success," testified FBI technology official Amy Hess.
Separately,
the tech advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the Justice
Department in San Francisco federal court on Tuesday, seeking to force the
disclosure of any secret orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court that may have forced companies such as Apple or Google to decrypt
communications.
Thomas
Galati, chief of intelligence at the New York Police Department, said his
investigators had been unable to open 67 Apple devices from October 2015 to
March 2016. Those phones were implicated in 44 violent crimes 23 felonies,
including 10 homicides, two rapes, and the shooting of an officer, Galati said.
The
government has redoubled its efforts to use the courts to force Apple's
cooperation in cracking encrypted iPhones by announcing plans to continue with
an appeal in a New York drug case.
The
secrecy surrounding the method used on the San Bernardino phone has prompted
criticism from security researchers who said Apple and others should be made
aware of the flaw, in accordance with a White House vulnerabilities review
process that favors disclosure.
But Obama
administration sources have told Reuters the group that helped unlock the
device has sole ownership of the method, making it highly unlikely the
technique would be disclosed by the government to Apple or anyone else.
“I don’t
think relying on a third party is a good model,” Representative Diana DeGette
of Colorado, the committee's top Democrat, said at the hearing.
(Reporting
by Dustin Volz in Washington; additional reporting by Dan Levine in San
Francisco; editing by Grant McCool)
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