Susan Crawford is a Harvard Law Professor and was President Barack Obama’s Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy.

From her Backchannel post:

The FBI has been terrific at reading statutes — including CALEA — in ways that require the rest of us to do headstands to understand what the agency is up to. Their claim about CALEA in their latest brief in the Apple case is a shining example of just this kind of breathless, vertiginous, Alice-in-Wonderland assertion: CALEA, they say, limited only law enforcement’s authority to directly require companies to redesign devices and software. But once law enforcement is authorized by a court to do a search — given a search warrant, in other words — then (under the AWA) an FBI official can ask the court to do what law enforcement is prohibited from doing directly under section 1002 of CALEA.

Got it? Right, I don’t either. As the well-respected lawyer Albert Gidari carefully explains in a recent blog post, this is a weirdly circular argument that ignores the specific limitation Congress enacted to remove the government from the business of dictating the design of phones or software. No gaps; no interpretive sunlight: CALEA stops the government from doing what it wants to do to Apple.

Read the whole thing. It’s terrific.