WeldonHunter
Well-Known Member
I never compared this to what happened with Apple. The main point I made was regardless of the fact that Liberty has a way in to the safe with some of them they do not own the safe and that's a valid reason to challenge any subpoena asking them to give it up. Just because they have a way to open one doesn't mean the courts have a right to make them give it to any agency. The other point is in all likelihood while the subpoena is being challenged the FBI or any other agency asking for this would call a locksmith to open it if the warrant they have grants them access. They aren't in all likelihood going to wait around for a decision on a subpoena when there's other avenues they can take to open a safe. That wasn't the case with the Apple situation.Yes, I'm aware subpoenas can be challenged. But not every challenge will be successful. Providing a reason to challenge a subpoena does not make that reason valid. Apple's challenge was valid. They did not have the passcode, they could not get the pass code, they did not have the software the feds wanted, and they were, for the sake of their customers, morally against creating for the feds a piece of software that the feds could use on an unknown number of phones moving forward. None of those reasons applied to Liberty. They already had the code in their possession and it could only be used on the one safe. So while the Apple subpoena asked for, in essence, an unknown amount of information for an unknown length of time, a subpoena to Liberty would be very limited in scope with respect to time and information. Sure, Liberty could challenge the subpoena but any win would come from taking time before the court ordered them to reveal the one code to the one safe. If the feds were not in a hurry to get the safe open, they could just wait it out.
If the feds were asking for the entire database, some concerns mentioned in this thread would be valid. But, as I said, if the scope of the subpoena was made narrow enough, it would be extremely difficult to come up with a valid reason to not comply.