FBI director says fight with Apple about terrorism, not setting precedent

FBI Director James Comey testifies to the House Judiciary Committee on March 1. (credit: C-Span3)

James Comey, the Federal Bureau of Investigation director, is defending the agency's legal battle with Apple, saying it is about fighting terrorism and not about setting legal precedent.

The director's comments, published Wednesday afternoon in the letters section of the Wall Street Journal, comes amid a slew of attacks against the agency for its handling of what is arguably the biggest legal showdown in modern tech history. The verbal assaults on the FBI are coming from the blogosphere, the rank-and-file public, and even the WSJ itself. The arguments essentially boil down to assertions that the FBI lied when stating that it could not open the iPhone used by San Bernardino terrorist Syed Farook and that it needed Apple's assistance in a court of law to set a legal precedent. The scheme asserts that because Congress won't adopt crypto-backdoor legislation or laws requiring companies like Apple to write code that undermines their own security, the FBI concocted a legal strategy to get the courts to do what lawmakers have refused to do.

Comey emphatically denied this idea and repeated that the FBI did not have the ability to access Farook's phone. Instead, he believes that the FBI decided to tentatively retreat once it was presented with a possible viable solution—which happened to come on Monday, just one day before the court hearing.

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