Over the last two years Apple has repeated requests by Chinese authorities to hand over its source code, said the company’s top lawyer to the U.S. lawmakers at a hearing on Tuesday.

Apple has been attacked by US law enforcement officials claiming that while the company acted as a complicit and handed over information to Chinese authorities for business reasons, it refused to cooperate with U.S. requests for access to private data in criminal investigations. Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell made the statement in response to this line of attack.

Highlighted in the case of a locked iPhone linked to a gunman in last December’s Islamist militant-inspired shootings in San Bernardino, California, Apple Inc and the FBI returned to Washington to testify before lawmakers about their heated disagreement over law enforcement access to encrypted devices.

The suggestion that Apple has quietly cooperated with Beijing was repeated by Captain Charles Cohen, commander in the Indiana State Police earlier in the hearing before a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee. Cohen only cited news reports when pressed by Representative Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat.

“That takes my breath away. That is a huge allegation,” a visibly frustrated Eshoo said.

Law enforcement officials told the hearing that investigators’ ability to pursue criminals were being handicapped by the growing use of strong default encryption on mobile devices and communications by criminal suspects. Apple Inc and other companies defend the technology as integral to protecting consumers.

His investigators had been unable to open 67 Apple devices in a six-month period from October 2015 to March 2016, said Thomas Galati, chief of intelligence at the New York Police Department. Ten homicides, two rapes, and an episode where an on-duty officer was shot were among the 44 violent crimes 23 felonies that those phones were implicated, Galati said.

Any vulnerability built into its products would harm “one hundred percent” of its users, argued Sewell, who testified on a separate panel before the same committee Tuesday alongside technology experts.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation had attempted to pursue a court order that compelled Apple to help the agency unlock a county-owned iPhone 5c tied to shooter Rizwan Farook in San Bernardino but retreated last month. A still secret third party helped the government hack into it.

By announcing plans to continue with an appeal in an unrelated New York drug case, the U.S. Department of Justice redoubled its efforts last week to use the courts to force Apple’s cooperation in cracking encrypted iPhones.

Amy Hess, executive assistant director for science and technology at the FBI, told a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Tuesday that the problems posed by increasingly prevalent strong default encryption are affecting federal and local law enforcement investigations across the country. On March 1, law enforcement officials and Apple executives had testified to Congress.

There has been criticism from security researchers who said Apple and others should be made aware of the flaw, in accordance with a White House vulnerabilities review process that favors disclosure, as the shroud of secrecy still cloaking the method used on the San Bernardino phone.

(Adapted from reuters.com)