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The Law Is Clear: the FBI Cannot Make Apple Rewrite Its OS (backchannel.com)
An anonymous reader cites a post by Susan Crawford, Harvard Law Professor and former Obama Special Assistant: From her column at Backchannel, "Barack Obama has a fine legal mind. But he may not have been using it when he talked about encryption last week. [...] The problem for the president is that when it comes to the specific battle going on right now between Apple and the FBI, the law is clear: twenty years ago, Congress passed a statute, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) that does not allow the government to tell manufacturers how to design or configure a phone or software used by that phone -- including security software used by that phone.
The default status is that the people have the right to do, or not to do, anything. The government has no rights, except as stated in the Constitution.
Therefore, passing a law preventing the government from doing something is oxymoronic. The government cannot force Apple to do anything - no legislation required. Any attempt to compel Apple must pass constitutional muster.
I get annoyed when the media reports something like "a law to legalize marijuana", or "a law to legalize abortion", or " a law to legalize gun ownership." The correct framing is "a law prohibiting...has been repealed/found unconstitutional."
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
You packed a lot of wrong into such a small post.
Unfortunately Apple isn't a 'communications carrier'.
The CALEA subchapter in question that prohibits the feds from mandating a particular design explicitly mentions manufacturers (quoting the relevant bit: "This subchapter does not authorize any law enforcement agency [...] to require any specific design of equipment, facilities, services, features, or system configurations to be adopted by [...] any manufacturer of telecommunications equipment [...]"), which would refer to Apple in this case, since cell phones are considered telecommunications devices. Neither the summary nor the article mention anything about CALEA being limited to just carriers, nor is that the case, since it applies to manufacturers, support service providers, and communications service providers, among others, so I have no clue where you got the incorrect notion that it only applied to carriers.
If this was a viable out then Apple would have used it. It isn't.
You are talking out of your ass, since this is exactly the line of argumentation Apple has been using in its briefs for the last several weeks. Here's Apple's latest brief, where they explicitly mention CALEA and its relevance to applying the All Writs Act. Where do you think this law professor got the idea? It's been the core of Apple's argument ever since their initial appeal of the order in February, since it undermines the very foundation on which the FBI is basing its demand. There have been multiple discussions here at Slashdot over this exact topic in the last few weeks alone. Apple has been arguing that the All Writs Act, which the FBI is using in order to conscript Apple's assistance, is inapplicable in situations where Congress has passed laws that provide more specificity. 200 years of legal precedent agree with that understanding. And, contrary to your assertions, CALEA clearly provides a higher degree of specificity that's directly applicable in this case, since it explicitly states that law enforcement cannot make these sorts of demands of manufacturers.
How your comment got +5 Insightful when it is such utter and complete rubbish is beyond me.