“Well, it’s not been a great week,” British Prime Minister David Cameron said at his party’s spring forum on Saturday, after the leaked Panama Papers revealed that his late father ran an offshore fund. “I could have handled this better. I know there are lessons to learn, and I will learn them.”

Meanwhile, hundreds of protesters calling for Cameron’s resignation rallied near his residence, 10 Downing Street.

Larry Miller in London tells NPR’s Newscast unit how this escalated:

“After Cameron’s spokesman initially said his financial affairs were a private matter, the question of whether the prime minister personally had links to the Panama-based fund was met with five days of repeated equivocation. Cameron finally conceded he did have shares but sold them before becoming leader, insisting he paid tax and did nothing illegal.”

Cameron’s admission that he had owned 5,000 shares worth some £30,000 ($42,375) in the fund came in a televised interview Thursday with ITV.

He has now pledged to release the last six years of his tax returns, Larry adds.

“Don’t blame No. 10 Downing Street or nameless advisors, blame me, and I will learn the lessons,” Cameron told his party members at the forum Saturday. “I was obviously very angry about what people were saying about my dad … but I musn’t let that cloud the picture.”

Labor Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn has called for Cameron to “give a full account of all his private financial dealings and make a statement to Parliament next week.”

“After years of calling for tax transparency and attacking complex offshore tax arrangements as ‘morally wrong,’ the Prime Minister has shown to have personally benefited from exactly such a secretive offshore investment,” Corbyn said in a statement Friday. “Once again the message has gone out that there is one rule for the wealthy and another for the rest of us.”

The Two-Way has gone into depth about the fallout from the Panama Papers around the world. Take a look here.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Colt is an iconic American gun company. It has a proud history of invention. It perfected the revolver before the Civil War. One advertising slogan went, “God created man, Sam Colt made them equal.” Big words for a big leap for the gun industry. The company also manufactured the famous M16 rifle for the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. The Colt .45 name even inspired a malt liquor.

But by the 1990s, Colt had fallen on hard times. Gun-control activists were on the march. Lawsuits were threatening gun company profits. Colt was facing bankruptcy.

And in 1994, an unlikely savior entered the Colt story. Donald Zilkha had a plan to revive the company by doubling down on Colt’s history of invention. He was going to build the next great leap forward in firearms: a safer gun. He imagined a smart gun that would only fire for an authorized user.

It did not go as he planned.

And nearly two decades later, his story explains why we can have a smartphone that only unlocks with its owner’s fingerprints, but we can’t have a gun that does the same.

Music: “Food Court Epiphanies.” Find us: Twitter/ Facebook.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Renewable energy and new technologies that are making low-carbon power more reliable are growing rapidly in the U.S. Renewables are so cheap in some parts of the country that they’re undercutting the price of older sources of electricity such as nuclear power.

The impact has been significant on the nuclear industry, and a growing number of unprofitable reactors are shutting down.

When the first nuclear power plants went online 60 years ago, nuclear energy seemed like the next big thing.

In many ways, it lived up to that promise. It turned out to be remarkably safe and reliable and clean. It’s carbon-free and is the source of about 20 percent of the country’s electricity.

But right from the start, people in the nuclear industry struggled with a big problem: cost. Making nuclear power cheap was the Holy Grail.

It never panned out. Nuclear plants keep coming in over-budget. And after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011 — when three nuclear reactors melted down after an earthquake and tsunami hit — companies were forced to spend millions of dollars more on safety equipment to keep older plants operating.

“It would be very difficult for any company to make a decision to try to build a new nuclear plant,” says Mike Twomey, a spokesman for Entergy Nuclear, which runs nuclear power plants.

Entergy has already taken one unprofitable reactor offline in Vermont and plans to close two more plants that are losing money in upstate New York and Massachusetts.

In all, 19 nuclear reactors are undergoing decommissioning, of which five have been shut down in the past decade, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The main reason behind the wave of closures is a new generation of cheap, gas-fired power plants that has pushed the wholesale price of electricity into the basement.

But Mycle Schneider, a nuclear industry analyst, says nuclear also faces growing price pressure from wind and solar. Renewable energy is so cheap in some parts of the U.S. that it’s even undercutting coal and natural gas.

“We are seeing really a radical shift in the competitive markets which leave nuclear power pretty much out in the rain,” Schneider says.

Over the past decade, no new nuclear power plants have begun commercial operations in the U.S.; the last reactor to start up in the U.S. was in Tennessee in 1996 (another unit at the same plant is expected to come online sometime later this year).

There are a handful of new nuclear reactors under construction in the South, where energy markets are still highly regulated. Big power authorities there don’t face the kind of head-to-head competition that has revolutionized energy markets in other parts of the country.

But even within the nuclear industry itself, a growing number of experts agree that the U.S. has reached a pivot point, where new nuclear power plants are just too expensive.

“We think that the costs of new nuclear right now are not competitive with other zero-carbon technologies, renewables and storage that we see in the marketplace,” says Joe Dominguez, executive vice president for governmental and regulatory affairs and public policy at Exelon, a nuclear power company that has announced plans to close one of its existing reactors in New Jersey.

Three other plants that are losing money in Illinois and upstate New York are also being reviewed for possible closure, Dominguez says.

“Right now we just don’t have any plans on the board to build any new reactors,” he says.

Companies like Exelon and Entergy hope state governments will agree to subsidize their existing reactors, paying a premium for low-carbon nuclear power in the same way they now subsidize wind and solar.

The companies say the steady power generated by nuclear still pays an important role stabilizing the nation’s energy grid.

But America’s reactors are aging. The average is now 35 years old. With the new investment going to natural gas and increasingly to wind and solar, the old energy of the future may soon be eclipsed by the new energy of the future.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

A New York judge has thrown out pop star Kesha’s hate-crime and human rights claims against producer Dr. Luke, who she says sexually and emotionally abused her for years.

Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Shirley Werner Kornreich cited the facts that the alleged abuses happened “outside New York and beyond the legal time limit” as reasons for why the claims can’t move forward, The Associated Press reports.

The judge also said “every rape is not a gender-motivated hate crime,” according to the news service.

This is the latest development in a legal battle that began in 2014 when Kesha sued Dr. Luke and business partner Sony, alleging that Dr. Luke drugged and raped her. The singer asked that she be let out of her contract with Kemosabe, a subsidiary of Sony. Dr. Luke denied the allegations and countersued Kesha for defamation.

In regard to her contract, the court sided with Dr. Luke (real name Lukasz Gottwald) and Sony, which has said Kesha can continue to make music for the label without Dr. Luke’s involvement. But as Fortune reported, that promise may not be as straightforward as it seems:

“Sony Music Entertainment has maintained that Kesha is allowed under her contract to record music with the company without Gottwald’s involvement, though Kesha lawyer Mark Geragos has referred to that claim as an ‘illusory promise.’ The singer argued that the recording company might not fully promote any new music she records due to the nasty legal fight, though Gottwald’s lawyer, Christine Lepera, has countered that Sony Music has already spent roughly $11 million promoting the singer’s music.”

Sony said Kesha was still under contract to make four more albums for Kemosabe. As NPR reported in February, Kesha said she wanted to do that without Dr. Luke.

“Kesha wants to record new music. Specifically, she wants to record it while the lawsuit against her producer, Dr. Luke, is going on. And, she wants to record it without the involvement of Dr. Luke or his label, Kemosabe, a Sony subsidiary. Dr. Luke has written and produced dozens of hits over the past decade and has worked with Kesha since her first big song, Flo Rida’s 2009 No. 1 single ‘Right Round.’ “

That ruling against Kesha prompted an outpouring of support for the singer from her fans and fellow artists using the hashtag FreeKesha. Taylor Swift even sent her a check for $250,000.

One part of Kesha’s claims, involving contract issues, is still in play, the AP reports.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Ever watch The Beverly Hillbillies and wonder why Jed Clampett moved to Beverly Hills and not Texas or some town that we more closely associate with oil?

Even Angelenos forget sometimes that the Clampetts came first, then the swimming pools and movie stars. Think J. Paul Getty or Edward Doheny, men who made their fortunes on oil and then made LA.

Los Angeles is a world center for transportation, fashion, manufacturing and — above all — entertainment. In the heart of this metropolis, oil is hidden in plain sight. If you go on a walk to clear your head at NPR’s Culver City studios, cross the street and you’re in one of the largest producing urban oil fields in America.

“When you think about Los Angeles, you tend to think of big skyscrapers and beaches. You don’t generally tend to think of oil wells,” says Lars Perner, a professor at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.

“This is fairly valuable real estate, with some rather expensive homes close by,” he says of the Inglewood oil field. Perner points to the Baldwin Hills and View Park neighborhoods that are considered the “Black Beverly Hills” for former residents such as Tina Turner, Ray Charles and Nancy Wilson. “This oil is clearly very valuable to justify using that space for those oil pumps,” Perner says.

He says that as iconic as the Hollywood sign or the movie studios are, it’s the oil wells that made modern life in LA possible. The LA Basin is very isolated and vast. That makes getting goods into the area difficult, and it made transporting goods around the region very tough. That is until the invention of the automobile and the discovery of oil.

“Back in those days there weren’t really a lot of regulations as to how you could drill, so a lot of people got very entrepreneurial. And they were trying to get pumps onto their property before their neighbors could,” Perner says.

You can find oil wells hidden all over Los Angeles. Beverly Hills High School has multiple oil wells on its campus. (The school’s wells were the subject of a class action suit brought by Erin Brockovich). Edward Doheny, for whom the major thoroughfare in Beverly Hills is named, discovered oil under a private residence in 1892. His find set off an oil-drilling spree. The battle over the rights to that oil could fill several history books and many films. As J. Paul Getty once said, “The meek shall inherit the earth, but not its mineral rights.”

Part of what made Los Angeles oil so attractive, Perner says, was that the oil was close to the surface and easy to extract. Add to that the newly invented automobile, incredible weather and a port, and that’s a recipe for exponential expansion.

But Perner suggests that without oil there would be no modern LA. “Well, the petroleum industry of course made it possible to have Hollywood.” And he says it made it made it possible to build an infrastructure to transport agricultural produce from other areas to help support the growth of a relatively large city very quickly.

“Los Angeles was a sleepy pueblo that became LA, and Hollywood and the studios all popped up and people got wealthy because of oil,” says David Slater, chief operating officer of Signal Hill Petroleum. In 1921, oil was discovered on Signal Hill, a city near the Port of Long Beach. These two discoveries are what made Los Angeles one of the world’s major petroleum fields.

It’s difficult to overstate just how much oil was being produced in LA back in the 1920s.

“The production from here made Los Angeles the equivalent of Saudi Arabia today,” Slater says.

Today, the city of Signal Hill is one of the largest urban producers of oil in the U.S. But the steep drop in oil prices has had a big impact on smaller oil companies like Signal Hill Petroleum.

“The painful part, though, is when prices go down, contracting our business and eliminating jobs is never ever a fun thing to go through,” says Slater. His company has shrunk from 150 employees to 85.

As he looked out over the bay of Long Beach, where supertankers line the horizon, Slater said he wished he could drill more. He joked that cheap gas wasn’t completely bad, as he drove us down Signal Hill in his white Escalade.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

A small fire forced the evacuation of the IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Monday.

Spokesman Terry Lemons told The Associated Press that the fire that started in the basement around 3:30 p.m., and created a lot of smoke — forcing the building to be evacuated.

The Washington Post reports:

The building closed about 2:45 p.m. Monday, before the fire started, “due to electrical issues with the air-conditioning system,” an IRS spokesman said. He said that about 2,000 people work there and that “a few hundred” were still in the building when the fire broke out.

There were no injuries and the cause is being investigated.

The building will be closed on Tuesday because it doesn’t have full electricity.

The fire will not affect processing of tax returns, which is done elsewhere, officials told The Post.

The tax return filing deadline is usually April 15, but this year taxpayers get a little more time to finish up — or in some cases get started.

Due to the Washington D.C. Emancipation Day holiday being observed on April 15 instead of April 16, 2016, Tax Day is on the following Monday, April 18.

But there are two exceptions: In Maine and Massachusetts, April 18 is Patriot’s Day, so taxpayers there have until April 19.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

The Department of Housing and Urban Development is making it easier for people with criminal records to find housing.

In new guidance, released Monday, HUD tells landlords and home sellers that turning down tenants or buyers based on their criminal records may violate the Fair Housing Act.

People with criminal records aren’t a protected class under the Fair Housing Act, and the guidance from HUD’s general counsel says that in some cases, turning down an individual tenant because of his or her record can be legally justified.

But blanket policies of refusing to rent to anybody with a criminal record are de facto discrimination, the department says — because of the systemic disparities of the American criminal justice system.

When A Criminal Past Closes Doors

One in four Americans has a criminal record, as NPR’s Carrie Johnson has reported. Those records can include arrests that never led to convictions, as well as convictions for a wide range of crimes — from petty to serious — that may have happened decades ago.

A record can make it hard to find a job — or a home. Many private landlords and public housing projects have policies against renting to people with criminal records.

Take Melvin Lofton, who spoke with NPR’s Cheryl Corley. Lofton was convicted of burglary and theft when he was in his 20s; now he’s 51.

He lives with his mom, and says it would be hard to find housing without that family connection. He remembers one time when he tried to rent a home in a trailer park.

“I was at work and the guy called me and told me to come pick up my keys. So I was happy. I got a place to stay,” Lofton says. “So then … 45 to 50 minutes later he calls and says, ‘Is there something you’re not telling me?’ and I say, ‘No, what is there? And he says, ‘You didn’t tell me you had a background.’ “

Lofton had been out of prison for 20 years at the time, Cheryl reports.

Seemingly Neutral Policies Can Be Discriminatory

HUD’s new guidance warns that landlords could be breaking the law when they refuse to rent to people with criminal records — even if they have no intention to discriminate — because such a policy would likely have a disproportionate impact on African-American and Hispanic applicants.

Housing Secretary Julian Castro puts it another way, NPR’s Cheryl Corley reports: “When landlords refuse to rent to anyone who has an arrest record, they effectively bar the door to millions of folks of color for no good reason.”

HUD notes that whether an individual landlord’s policy has a discriminatory impact will need to be determined on a case-by-case basis. But on a national level, HUD provided a list of statistics — direct from the Justice Department — demonstrating disproportionately high rates of arrest and incarceration based on race. They noted African-American men are imprisoned at a rate nearly six times that of white men, and Hispanic men at more than twice the rate of white men.

All Criminal Records Aren’t Created Alike …

That doesn’t mean landlords are completely barred from considering criminal records — but they’d have to prove that their policy legitimately serves to protect safety or property.

Saying “criminals are poor tenants” doesn’t cut it, HUD says: “Bald assertions based on generalization or stereotype” aren’t sufficient.

Barring people based just on arrest records is no good, HUD says, because arrests alone aren’t proof of guilt. And even if you only consider convictions, refusing to rent to all ex-cons — “no matter when the conviction occurred, what the underlying conduct entailed, or what the convicted person has done since then,” HUD writes — also isn’t defensible, since not all ex-cons will pose a risk to safety or property.

Instead, HUD writes, landlords should have a policy that takes into consideration what the crime was and when it happened, as well as other factors, to reduce the discriminatory impact. (The only exception is if a conviction was for manufacturing or distributing drugs.)

… And You Can’t Use Records As A Pretext For Discrimination

HUD also warns landlords that if they do intend to discriminate, and use criminal records as a cover for their actions, they can be found in violation.

For instance, landlords who reject black or Hispanic applicants ostensibly because of criminal records — but accept a white tenant with a similar criminal record — could be found guilty of violating the Fair Housing Act.

That discrimination could happen even before a candidate applies, HUD writes:

“Intentional discrimination may be proven based on evidence that, when responding to inquiries from prospective applicants, a property manager told a African American individual that her criminal record would disqualify her from renting an apartment, but did not similarly discourage a White individual with a comparable criminal record from applying.”

In both cases — whether the discrimination is accidental or intentional — each instance would have to be considered on a case by case basis.

But “arbitrary and overbroad” policies, as well as any that are mere pretexts to conceal discrimination, aren’t protected.

HUD officials told NPR’s Cheryl Corley that the goal is to make landlords consider: Is their policy towards criminal records about keeping a community safe?

Or is it about keeping somebody out of a home?

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

The first sign seems innocuous enough if you don’t know what you’re looking at: Files in the computer appear as decrypt.html, or decrypt.txt instead of their usual names.

Then, you click. A box pops up that gives you an ultimatum: Want the file? You’ll have to pay up, and probably in bitcoin.

That is what happened at U.S. hospitals in the past month in California, Kentucky, Maryland and the District of Columbia. The malware attacks have left the 14 hospitals — 10 of which are part of the MedStar hospital group — unable to access patient data and, in some cases, having to turn patients away.

Hospitals are not alone in their vulnerability; last month, a cafe in Maryland was hit with a ransomware attack. In another instance, Mac computers were targeted. Last year, police in Massachusetts paid hackers to return access to their data. Companies and individuals in the U.S. lost more than $24 million to ransomware in 2015, according to the FBI.

And in February at the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles, administrators paid the asking price of 40 bitcoin, about $16,664 at the time, to regain access to their data. At MedStar, the hospital is being asked to pay 45 bitcoin.

Several MedStar employees saw a message on their computer screens: “You just have 10 days to send us the Bitcoin. After 10 days we will remove your private key and it’s impossible to recover your files.”

“The big difference with health care is that the consequences are greater,” Kevin Fu, an associate professor at the University of Michigan who studies computer security issues in hospitals, told the MIT Technology Review. “You can lose your email and that’s annoying, but patient records are needed in order to treat patients.”

Though bitcoin is not in itself a driver of cybercrime, it allows the hackers to have instant access to the money without its having to go through a bank or credit card. Peter Van Valkenburgh, director of research at Coin Center, a nonprofit dedicated to digital currency advocacy, explains that often the ransomware will include easy-to-follow instructions on how to quickly access and trade bitcoin.

Hospitals hit by the attack felt the pressure of being without patient information. At a MedStar hospital, a patient was given an antibiotic that, a nurse told the Washington Post, “should have been stopped eight hours earlier.” At the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center last month, patients were diverted to other hospitals. In both situations, the hospitals returned to paper records.

On its website Thursday, MedStar posted: “MedStar Health’s priority continues to be providing high quality, safe patient care, as we work to fully restore all of our major IT systems. Our doors remain open, with a few exceptions. With the dedication and commitment of our clinicians and associates, we are thankful that we have been able to perform more than 1,000 surgeries since Monday morning’s malicious malware attack.”

Rick Pollack, president and CEO of the American Hospital Association, emphasizes that hospitals should take steps to protect patient data: “Hospital leaders are using the lessons learned in previous attacks and are applying best cybersecurity practices shared by the AHA in an effort to anticipate and respond to existing and emerging threats,” he says.

The FBI is investigating several of these recent attacks. An FBI official tells NPR:

“Companies can prevent and mitigate malware infection by utilizing appropriate backup and malware detection and prevention systems, and training employees to be skeptical of emails, attachments, and websites they don’t recognize. The FBI does not condone payment of ransom, as payment of extortion monies may encourage continued criminal activity, lead to other victimizations, or be used to facilitate serious crimes.”

Hospitals can take a variety of steps to safeguard against these kinds of attacks, like using HTTPS encryption, two-factor authentication and implementing file backups on a separate server. “For hospitals right now, backups of customer data on unconnected machines or machines in other networks is essential,” Van Valkenburgh says.

He adds that patients should have more control over who has access to their personal records, and when. But until then? “We really are at the mercy of these centralized institutions,” he says.

Naomi LaChance is a business news intern at NPR.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

The Federal Communications Commission is officially proposing to begin regulating how Internet service providers handle user privacy. The agency is looking to restrict the companies’ ability to share with advertisers and other third parties the information they collect about what their customers do online.

The agency’s vote, however, was delayed for more than three hours by last-minute negotiations among commissioners and the chairman. At stake was a budget cap for a telecom subsidy program, which the FCC subsequently voted to expand to cover both phone and Internet service.

The Privacy Proposal

The FCC voted to begin collecting public comment on its chairman’s proposal to let consumers weigh in on what information ISPs collect about them and how that information gets used.

As we reported previously, “as they connect us to the Internet, ISPs have insight into our lives — websites we frequent, apps we download or locations we visit — and may use that data for their own promotions or sell it to data brokers to be used for marketing or other purposes.”

Under this new proposal — formally approved by a 3-2 Democratic majority of FCC commissioners — consumers would be able to opt out of programs that let ISPs use the data they collect to offer other services themselves, but the companies would require explicit opt-in consent for data to be shared with third parties.

“It’s the consumers’ information and the consumers should have the right to determine how it’s used,” said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler.

Telecom companies are against this proposal, arguing it puts them on an unequal footing with other Internet companies that collect data on users, like Google and Netflix, which are only overseen by the Federal Trade Commission. Republican FCC commissioners, too, dissented from the proposal, calling it corporate favoritism.

The FCC will now collect public comment on this proposal before voting to set new rules.

The Subsidy Changes

Since 1985, a government program called Lifeline has helped low-income people pay for phone service — first landlines and later cellphones. On Thursday, the FCC voted to begin allowing the recipients of the subsidy, which is $9.25 a month, to choose whether to spend it on a phone or an Internet connection, wired or wireless.

This is the vote that delayed the typically punctual FCC under Wheeler. The FCC’s two Republican commissioners and one of the Democrats, Mignon Clyburn, had apparently worked on a last-minute deal to cap the budget of the program at $2 billion a year, but the deal was ultimately scuttled.

“I negotiated in good faith to have a budget mechanism in place that ensures millions of new households will have the opportunity to afford advanced telecommunications services,” Clyburn said. “Upon further deliberation, I concluded that such a mechanism could not fully achieve my vision of a 21st century Lifeline program.”

The program, funded through fees paid by telephone companies and users, spent about $1.5 billion in 2015 and has no cap. It had in the past come under fire for waste and abuse and underwent updates and changes in 2012. Republicans have long called for restrictions to the subsidy’s budget.

The FCC voted — also 3-2 along party lines, with stern and impassioned objections from the Republicans — to set a budget of $2.25 billion a year without a hard cap and impose new eligibility checks, service standards and a funding review process. The FCC estimates that the subsidy currently helps about 12 million households afford phone service.

The Unfinished Business

The FCC has a few other things on tap for the coming weeks:

• Airwaves Auction

The agency on Tuesday launched a major auction of airwaves, or in telecom parlance, spectrum. It’s expected to take several months.

The agency plans to first reclaim airwaves from TV stations and then sell them to telecom companies in what’s going to be the most complex auction of radio frequencies in history. The idea is to incentivize broadcasters to give up some of their airwaves, freeing up more spectrum for the growing use of mobile devices.

• Cable Merger

The regulators are also expected to deliver a verdict on the proposed $67 billion cable merger of Charter Communications, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. All signs are pointing to an approval with conditions, but the timing and details are unclear.

As the New York Times reports, the deal would create the second-largest broadband provider behind Comcast and third-largest video provider after Comcast (whose bid to buy Time Warner Cable was rejected last year) and DirecTV (which was bought by AT&T last year).

• Net Neutrality

And the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals will decide whether the FCC gets to keep the hotly debated “net neutrality” rules that redefined the agency’s authority over Internet service providers.

Though the timing of the court decision is uncertain, Wheeler in an interview with NPR earlier this month said it could be “in the next few weeks,” consistent with the industry’s expectation of the ruling sometime this spring.

The key question in front of the court is whether the FCC had proper authority to reclassify broadband Internet as a more heavily regulated telecommunications service, similar to traditional telephony.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Throughout the fight over whether Apple should help unlock the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone was the understanding that this was not Apple’s first time at bat.

Now, documents show that Apple has been facing similar requests since at least 2008, and that the Silicon Valley giant is not alone, as Google, too, has fielded calls for help unlocking phones in court, for instance to bypass a lock screen and reset a password.

The documents came out of a request by the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained court records from around the country on cases where the government invoked the All Writs Act — the broad 1789 law at the center of the Apple-FBI dispute — to compel a tech company’s help in retrieving contents of a locked device.

The documents reveal 63 confirmed cases where the government asked Apple or Google through courts to help get inside a locked device, predominantly in drug crime investigations, the ACLU says. Though disclosures in an ongoing Brooklyn case had confirmed that the Justice Department had about 70 existing All Writs orders, the documents show that Google is as involved in them as Apple.

Google said this in a statement to The Wall Street Journal:

“We carefully scrutinize subpoenas and court orders to make sure they meet both the letter and spirit of the law,” a Google spokesman said. “However, we’ve never received an All Writs Act order like the one Apple recently fought that demands we build new tools that actively compromise our products’ security…. We would strongly object to such an order.”

What the documents also show is the extent to which a legal precedent from the high-profile San Bernardino case could have had a far-reaching influence. More and more commonly, investigators are faced with complex digital locks that they believe hide important evidence. But what should be the role of the tech companies in unlocking them?

“The FBI wants you to think that it will use the All Writs Act only in extraordinary cases to force tech companies to assist in the unlocking of phones,” ACLU attorney Eliza Sweren-Becker said. “Turns out, these kinds of orders have actually become quite ordinary.”

Over the years, government agencies including the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have requested a variety of types of help from Google and Apple in cases that span all regions of the country from New Mexico to Massachusetts, Oregon to Alabama, court records show.

Though the documents don’t show the extent of the companies’ compliance, we do know that in some cases, Apple did comply as has been disclosed before.

For instance, in the 2008 Secret Service investigation of a child exploitation case, United States v. Jansen, Apple helped bypass the lock screen of an iPhone at the court’s request.

In some of the cases in the ACLU records, the government plays out the arguments seen in the San Bernardino case. “The government is aware, and can represent, that in other cases, courts have ordered the unlocking of an iPhone under this authority,” U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag and Assistant U.S. Attorney Garth Hire write in a 2014 case in the Northern District of California. “Additionally, Apple has routinely complied with such orders.”

And then, the magistrate judge, Kandis Westmore, writes in response: “Apple shall not be required to maintain copies of any user data … all evidence preservation shall remain the responsibility of law enforcement agents.”

Naomi LaChance is a business news intern at NPR.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)