The US justice department cannot use a 227-year-old law to force Apple to provide the FBI with access to locked iPhone data, a judge ruled. It dealt a blow to the government in its battle with the company over privacy and public safety. The ruling by US Magistrate Judge James Orenstein applied narrowly to one drug case in Brooklyn, New York City. But it gives support to the company in its fight against a California judge's order that it create specialised software to help the FBI hack into an iPhone linked to the San Bernardino terrorism investigation. Mr Orenstein belittled some government arguments, saying lawyers were stretching an old law "to produce impermissibly absurd results". He rejected their claims that Apple was only concerned with public relations, and said he found no limit on how far the government would go to require a person or company to violate the most deeply-rooted values. Both cases hinge partly on whether a law written long before the computer age, the 1789 All Writs Act, could be used to compel Apple to co-operate with efforts to retrieve data from encrypted phones. Mr Orenstein said the question was not whether the government should be able to force...
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