The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office will use its budget to support the federal government’s efforts to get Apple to unlock a terrorist’s iPhone as local prosecutors have also been hampered by the inability to get encrypted data from Apple devices, said County Attorney Bill Montgomery.
Employee iPhones won’t be confiscated, and no service contracts will be broken. But Montgomery said going forward, the Apple smartphones won’t be given to new employees, and existing staff can’t choose them for replacements or upgrades.
“My decision has everything to do with the deliberate difficulties Apple has created for legitimate law enforcement investigations involving constitutional due process and criminal activity,” he said.
Montgomery also thinks Apple is ignoring Fourth Amendment protections by fighting a judge’s order to help federal investigators break into the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters.
The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable search and seizure, but Montgomery thinks investigators have probable cause to look at the phone's contents.
“A judge is going to make ruling consistent with constitutional jurisprudence on guiding law enforcement on what they can and cannot do, so it meets constitutional requirements,” he said.
Montgomery said he’d reconsider the policy if Apple decides to cooperate with federal authorities. About 65 percent of the office’s 564 deployed cell phones are iPhones, and it could take years before they’re all gone.
Montgomery said he uses a Samsung device that he switched to last year.
