EFF's Cindy Cohn On Why 'Code Is Speech' Is Key To Apple vs. FBI

blottsie writes: In a series of court battles in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Cindy Cohn represented plaintiffs challenging restrictions on DVD copying and the publication of cryptographic code. In all three cases—Bernstein v. United States, Universal City Studios v. Reimerdes, and Junger v. Daley—federal courts held that computer code merited protection under the First Amendment. Cohn, now the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, endorsed Apple's repeated citations of her cases in its fight against a court order to unlock a terrorism suspect's iPhone for the FBI. But she said that the controversial iPhone-unlocking order impinged even further on Apple's free-speech rights than the restrictions in her cases.

Comments

Action vs Speech

[Luthair]

Its weird to me that they could compel someone from a corp to open a safety deposit box but write a few lines of code would be a no-go.