In a short letter filed Friday evening, US federal prosecutors wrote to a Brooklyn judge to say that they no longer needed Apple’s help in accessing the data on a seized iPhone 5S running iOS 7 associated with a drug case.

In the letter, United States Attorney Robert Capers wrote:

The government respectfully submits this letter to update the Court and the parties. Yesterday evening, an individual provided the passcode to the iPhone at issue in this case. Late last night, the government used that passcode by hand and gained access to the iPhone. Accordingly, the government no longer needs Apple’s assistance to unlock the iPhone, and withdraws its application.

This case pre-dates the debacle that played out earlier this year in San Bernardino, but relied on many of the same legal arguments. Here, in October 2015, the government asked the court to grant it an order that would have forced Apple to assist the unlocking of a phone belonging to Jun Feng, a man who eventually pleaded guilty to drug charges. Unlike the case in California however, Apple does have the ability to extract data on pre-iOS 8 devices with minimal difficulty. Feng has claimed that he forgot the passcode to this particular iPhone. According to the Wall Street Journal , it was Feng himself who recently supplied the passcode to investigators.

Regardless, in both cases, the government claimed that it had the authority to force Apple to help under the All Writs Act, an obscure late-18th-century law. In a February 2016 ruling in this New York case, US Magistrate Judge James Orenstein sided with Apple and concluded that what the government was asking for went too far. In his ruling, he worried about a "virtually limitless expansion of the government's legal authority to surreptitiously intrude on personal privacy."

The government said it would ask a more senior judge, known as a district judge, to weigh in. Last week, Apple responded, noting that it would continue to resist the government’s attempts to conscript its aid.

"The government has failed to show that it is has exhausted other potential repositories of the information it wants from Feng’s iPhone," Apple lawyer Theodore Boutrous wrote in the 55-page filing, which was very similar to the earlier filings in the San Bernardino case.

In a statement issued Friday night, Emily Pierce, a Department of Justice spokesman, reiterated the government’s claim that such cases "have never been about setting a court precedent."

"In this case, an individual provided the department with the passcode to the locked phone at issue in the Eastern District of New York," she wrote. "Because we now have access to the data we sought, we notified the court of this recent development and have withdrawn our request for assistance. This is an ongoing investigation and therefore we are not revealing the identity of the individual."

Apple spokesman Fred Sainz declined to comment.