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The FBI’s director has weighed in on the ongoing controversy over whether Apple should help unlock an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters, saying the nation owes the victims “a thorough and professional investigation under law,” The Washington Post reports. 

“We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist’s passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a decade to guess correctly. That’s it. We don’t want to break anyone’s encryption or set a master key loose on the land,” a prominent national security law blog with an elite and specialized audience James Comey wrote on the website LawFare, as cited by the Washington Post.
The statement did not specifically mention Apple by name. After appearing on LawFare, the letter was issued as a press release on the FBI’s website. Apple has refused to help the FBI unlock the iPhone, getting support from some in the tech industry and privacy advocates such as Edward Snowden even as some victims’ families and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump urged the company to do what the FBI wants. And, last week, the Justice Department filed a motion in federal court requesting an order to make Apple comply, the newspaper notes.

“We have awesome new technology that creates a serious tension between two values we all treasure — privacy and safety,” Comey wrote. “That tension should not be resolved by corporations that sell stuff for a living. It also should not be resolved by the FBI, which investigates for a living. It should be resolved by the American people deciding how we want to govern ourselves in a world we have never seen before.”
Considering that the government has gone to court to force Apple to disable the feature that wipes data from the phone after 10 incorrect password tries, it was unclear what Comey meant by having the dispute resolved “by the American people.” Both Apple and the government have been openly attempting to rally public opinion to their side, however, with Justice Department lawyers accusing the company of putting its “brand marketing” ahead of the law.

However, this is not the first time Comey has urged Apple to act. “It is a big problem for law enforcement armed with a search warrant when you find a device that can’t be opened even though the judge said there’s probably cause to open it,” Comey said on Februry 9. “… It effects our counterterrorism work. With San Bernardino, a very important investigation to us, we still have one of those killer’s phones that we have not been able to open. And it’s been over two months now. We’re still working on it. What we would like is a world where people are able to comply with court orders. ”

A U.S. magistrate has ordered Apple to help the FBI unlock the phone, used by Syed Farook, who killed 14 people in San Bernardino with wife Tashfeen Malik before the couple was killed by police. Apple chief executive Tim Cook, however, has resisted calls to act, saying it has “implications far beyond the legal case at hand.”