From the Associated Press
Can the FBI Force a Company to Break Into Its Own Products?
By Brandon Bailey, Associated Press
Can the FBI force a company like Apple to extract data from a customer's smartphone? In the fight over an iPhone used by an extremist killer in San Bernardino, some legal experts say Congress has never explicitly granted that power. And now a federal judge agrees in a similar case....
CALEA intentionally covers only telecommunications carriers and specifically excludes "information service providers" — including Internet companies such as Apple and Google. Extensive negotiation produced a law that preserved the wiretapping ability authorities already had without adding new types of surveillance capabilities, said Deirdre Mulligan, co-director of the Center for Law & Technology [and associate professor at the School of Information] at the University of California, Berkeley
The Federal Communications Commission updated CALEA-related regulations in 2005 to extend the government's sway to voice-over-Internet phone services. Moves to expand it further, however, have fizzled, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service, which cited proposals for extending the law to "a wide range of technology services," including instant messaging and video game chats.
"This is a power that Congress has had numerous opportunities to extend and has chosen not to," said Mulligan....
(This article appeared in multiple outlets worldwide.)