Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Thursday reassured late night host Stephen Colbert that the Justice Department is not seeking a backdoor into Apple iPhones.
“I’ve had a number of great conversations with [Apple CEO] Tim Cook on issues of privacy,” Lynch told Colbert. “I understand this issue is important to everyone.”
“We’re not asking for a backdoor, nor are we asking to turn anything on to spy on anyone,” she said. “What we’re asking them to do is do what their customer wants. The owner of the phone is the county, the employer of one of the terrorists who is now dead.”
“What we’re asking them to do is help us disable the password erase function that basically wipes the phone if you guess the password wrong after ten times,” she added. “Under the court order that we have gotten, it is very narrow, it is very focused.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is seeking Apple’s assistance with breaking into an iPhone used by one of the perpetrators of a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif. Apple has argued that assistance would set a dangerous precedent, and ultimately allow the government to compel its assistance with actions like covertly accessing the microphones and cameras installed on the devices.
Lynch was also asked whether she believed Hillary Clinton would be indicted for her misuse of a private server in her home to send and receive emails as secretary of state. But as usual, she demurred.
“I get asked this question a lot,” Lynch responded. “The answer is we don’t talk about ongoing matters under review by the Justice Department. The reason we don’t do that is that no matter who’s involved in a case, no matter whether they’re famous or you’ve never heard of them before, we do our investigations and our cases the same way every time.
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“We’ve got career agents and lawyers looking at this. They look at the facts, they look at the law, they come to a recommendation. They do their job fairly and they do it independently,” she concluded.
