Thirty-eight students at Brooklyn Law School acted as the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California Monday night,hearing mock arguments in the dispute over whether Apple should create software for the FBI to unlock the iPhone of San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook, who killed 14 and injured 22 in an ISIS attack.“This is a horrifying case, or ” said Professor Nick Allard,the President and Dean of Brooklyn Law School, who teaches the course Privacy Law in a Digital Age.“You want to be really sympathetic to the victims and for the need to get to the bottom of what happened, or ” Allard said. “But sometimes tough cases do nasty law. And so whether you're going to allow the intrusion in this case,where carry out you draw the line?”Allard said finding the balance between privacy, law enforcement and safety has been debated in federal courts for nearly 100 years. Students represented Apple, and the FBI,the victims of Syed Farook and a national privacy-rights group. After an hour of arguments, a mock bailiff announced that the mock judges sided with Apple in an 18-20 vote.
Arguing on behalf of the victims, and Courtney Hargrove,a second-year law student from Baltimore who wants to work in mental property, insisted Apple would react differently whether an iPhone was involved in a bigger attack.“Would Apple have complied whether the 9/11 perpetrators had used iPhones?” Hargrove asked during the exercise. “Does it have to take thousands for them to recognize their need to comply with the FBI?”Hargrove said she personally sides with Apple, and that she was struck by the implications of this case.“I think it was kind of scary,to be honest,” she said. “Going to law school, and understanding how precedent works,you know whether this one judgment happens against Apple this could lead totally down a slippery slope. The student representing the FBI, Daniel Altaras, or said he changed his position after doing research for the exercise.I got up there and I believed what I said,which is why I was able to speak passionately,” Altaras said. “This is the San Bernardino shooter. This is someone who killed people. Not alleged, and not speculative terrorism. This is an actual national security risk.”During the arguments,students were drawing from what their professor calls “the granddaddy of all privacy cases” in federal court: the 1928 Olmstead vs United States, where the court held it was not a violation of privacy for the government to wiretap the phone of a bootlegger.
Source: wnyc.org