Here's how Apple's bat-signal united the entire tech industry against the FBI
Aaron Levie didn't realize just how big of a fight was brewing when Apple stood up to an FBI request to crack a gunman's iPhone.
"At first, the reaction was, okay, wow, this is going to be a difficult conversation between Apple and the FBI," Levie, the CEO and cofounder of Box, an online file storage service, told Mashable in an interview. "Then two or three hours later, you realize that actually this is going to be a difficult conversation for the tech industry."
"And then a day or two later," he added, "you realize this is going to be a difficult global conversation."
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Levie's series of realizations mirrors that of the technology industry more broadly. In the first hours and days after Apple rejected a court order to unlock an iPhone belonging to one of the gunmen behind the mass shooting in San Bernardino, tech executives struggled to understand the full implications of Apple's very public battle with the FBI -- then labored over the best possible legal and PR response while media scrutiny on the case mounted.
On Thursday night, after weeks of hedged statements and rumored misgivings about the controversial case, dozens and dozens of Silicon Valley's most prominent businesses spoke up loudly and in unison by filing joint legal briefs in court to support the company just before the deadline.
Apple's long list of backers combined old industry stalwarts like Microsoft, Intel and Cisco with flashy billion-dollar startups like Snapchat and Airbnb. It brought together fierce rivals like Google and Amazon, Facebook and Twitter. And it spanned industry trade groups, privacy organizations and more than 30 law professors.
The calvary had finally arrived at the last possible moment. All it took was a nearly unprecedented amount of coordination between fierce competitors, internal debates over the PR optics for each business and reams of old-fashioned paperwork that barely made it to the court in time.
'Safety in numbers'
Hours after Apple announced its challenge to the court order, two technology companies reached out to the legal team that ultimately put together the joint amicus brief eventually signed by Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others, according to sources intimately familiar with the filing process.
Both companies were interested in making a similar argument: that law enforcement was pushing for "extraordinary" powers, which should only be achieved through legislators in Congress rather than the courts.
That kicked off a frantic high-stakes effort to see if they could put together a lengthy and compelling legal argument on a tight deadline in the face of fiercely divided public opinion, while simultaneously working to build a meaningful coalition of supporters in the industry so no single business would have to go it alone.
"There’s always safety in numbers," says Stephen Vladeck, professor of law at American University. "The industry-wide support for Apple’s position has made it easier for individual firms to take firmer public positions against the government."
Easier, yes, but still risky.
The slow march into battle
By most accounts, it was the FBI, not Apple, that picked the public battleground for this fight.
Apple reportedly asked the FBI to file its request for a special tool to get into the shooter's iPhone under seal so the ensuing debate could be had in private. The FBI declined, suggesting that the agency believed this case, with its significant human cost and clear national security issues, was the best one possible to make a public stand against unfettered privacy and encryption.
Apple, already burned once by the NSA revelations and eager to preserve an image as a defender of user privacy, saw little choice but to take a strong public stance in response. Its peers in the tech industry, however, were weary of rushing out with ill-considered public statements.
"What you’ve seen play out over the past two weeks is a concerted effort of trying to figure out both the legal elements of this case, the technology elements of this case and what the right kind of balance and message is given the difficulty of the situation," Levie says.
Numerous public and private technology companies stayed quiet for the first 24-48 hours when asked for comment by Mashable. Many of those who did speak either did so through third-party groups or through carefully-worded statements from top execs that stopped short of providing clear backing to either Apple or the FBI.
Several tech companies, as Mashable previously reported, have pending legal cases of their own as well as lucrative sales relationships with government offices that could be compromised by speaking out to boldly against the FBI.
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The best, and perhaps only reasonable, option took hold by the end of the first week: stand together with a collective legal filing.
"It wasn't clear in the beginning that it was even possible," says Paul Sieminski, general counsel for Automattic, the billion-dollar startup that owns Wordpress, and which joined with Twitter, Airbnb and others on a separate amicus brief filed in support of Apple.
The concern was that there wouldn't be enough time to organize a joint filing. But once Congress invited representatives from Apple and the FBI to testify in court, the deadline was pushed back to March 3.
From there it was go, go, go.
"It takes a week or two to write a 25-page legal brief. That's why there was a period of silence," Sieminski says. "Behind the scenes, all the lawyers were in touch," he adds. Even those from Apple.
Apple, in short, knew it was not alone.
Down to the wire
Facebook, Google, Twitter and others teased plans last week to back Apple with amicus briefs, but in conversations with Mashable at the time, the companies remained unclear about the specifics.
The clock kept ticking, yet no filings appeared throughout the first half of this year.
After the brief was filed on Thursday, one source close to Google admitted that just getting all the companies on board and determining the precise wording that would be agreeable to all took a lot of time and energy.
It turns out out there was another kink in the plans: the courthouse where the amicus briefs needed to be filed does not accept electronic filings.
So the brief, and its subsequent revisions, had to be handled on actual paper -- an ironic outcome.
As one source close to the filing process put it in an interview, "The biggest technology case in our lifetime -- and it was all paper."
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Seth Fiegerman was a Senior Business Reporter at Mashable, where he covered startups, marketing and the latest consumer tech trends. He joined Mashable in August 2012 and is based in New York.Before joining Mashable, Seth covered all things Apple as a reporter at Silicon Alley Insider, the tech section of Business Insider. He has also worked as a staff writer at TheStreet.com and as an editor at Playboy Magazine. His work has appeared in Newsweek, NPR, Kiplinger, Portfolio and The Huffington Post.Seth received his Bachelor of Arts from New York University, where he majored in journalism and philosophy.In his spare time, Seth enjoys bike riding around Brooklyn and writing really bad folk songs.
