A recent post about the FBI claims in the iPhone case reminded me of this Dilbert cartoon, where Dogbert advises Dilbert:
Maybe for your first crime you shouldn’t put your name and address on it and distribute ti to ten thousand strangers.
There is a similar rule for lying to judges, the first rule being never to lie to a judge, its just bad practice but especially never lie when it can be proven that you are lying.
Representatives of law enforcement broke that second rule and compounded the error by lying in written pleadings.
In the iPhone case, Daniel Kahn Gillmor makes an air-tight case for the FBI having lied to the court both in its initial application and in subsequent pleadings about the “auto-erase” feature of the iPhone in question. One of the FBI’s Major Claims in the iPhone Case is Fraudulent.
In a nutshell, the FBI has attempted to mis-lead the court into thinking the “auto-erase” feature dooms the FBI to ten tries at guessing the password. A lay person might think so but with just a little thought, you make a backup of the NAND flash memory where the encrypted data is stored. Try to your heart’s content, but only ten attempts before you have to restore the memory.
In addition to lying to the court, the FBI gambled on the court possibly lacking the technical background to realize the falseness of the FBI’s claims.
That’s more rank than outright lying to the court. All parties to litigation have an affirmative obligation to see that the court is fully and accurately informed of the facts before it.
After denying the government’s claims in the iPhone case, the court should refer the attorneys for the government to the Califoria Bar association for disciplinary hearings.