Major Silicon Valley companies are joining forces to support Apple in its ongoing privacy battle against the FBI. Top companies like Twitter, Yahoo, Airbnb, LinkedIn, eBay, Square, Reddit and many others have filed an amicus brief in US federal court. With the help of amicus briefs, parties who are not directly involved in a court case can add additional weight, context and information to an ongoing argument.
Apple shared a list of all the companies that have filed the joint amicus briefs on its website. Last month, Microsoft, Facebook and Google had come together to support Apple over the privacy battle with Department of Justice over iPhone backdoor case. A total of 40 companies are expected to publicly back the company and 17 of those companies have officially voiced support in a brief to the Department of Justice.
The companies are uniting against the government on the grounds the All Writs Act does not compel Apple to comply with its request. Airbnb, Atlassian, Automattic, CloudFlare, eBay, GitHub, Kickstarter, LinkedIn, Mapbox, Medium, Meetup, Reddit, Square, Squarespace, Twilio, Twitter and Wickr are the companies that have filed the joint amicus brief.
The joint brief which is filed by the aforementioned companies reads,
The government’s demand here, at its core, is unbound by any legal limits. It would set a dangerous precedent, in which the government could sidestep established legal procedures authorized by thorough, nuanced statutes to obtain users’ data in ways not contemplated by lawmakers.