The Justice Department told a federal judge Friday that it would continue to pursue a court order demanding Apple extract data from a seized iPhone at the center of a New York drug probe.

The move comes weeks after the government withdrew a similar request in an unrelated terror investigation in the Southern California county of San Bernardino. Authorities abandoned their San Bernardino intentions after the feds informed the magistrate presiding over the case that the FBI no longer needed Apple's assistance in unlocking the 5C model because it had done so with the help of an "outside" party. However, it became increasingly clear two days ago that authorities would likely forge ahead with this bid in the New York case after James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said the workaround purchased in the San Bernardino case was exclusive to the 5C and not other models like the 5S involved in this New York drug probe.

"The government’s application is not moot, and the government continues to require Apple’s assistance in accessing the data that it is authorized to search by warrant," the Justice Department wrote (PDF) in a letter to the federal judge presiding over the case.

The New York case is different in several ways. In the San Bernardino case, Apple was asked to build software to help the authorities unlock the iOS 9 device of suspected terrorist Syed Farook, who along with his wife shot and killed 14 people and injured several others at a county government building December 2. Apple said its security on that phone did not allow it to gain access, and that's why the feds wanted it to create new software to undermine the phone's security. In the New York case, Apple does have the ability to access the locked phone running iOS 7, but instead it is refusing to do so despite assisting the authorities in unlocking encrypted phones in the past.

The government's legal action Friday amounts to it saying it would appeal the magistrate's February 29 decision in which the magistrate sided with Apple and said it didn't have to comply with an earlier granted search warrant. The magistrate's decision will now be reviewed by a federal judge. The drug defendant in the case, Jun Feng, has already pleaded guilty. Yet the authorities think data on the drug dealer's phone might help them in the drug investigation.

Another key difference in the two cases were the rulings by the two magistrates. The government asserted that a 1789 law, known as the All Writs Act, demanded that Apple assist the authorities. The magistrate in the Southern California case agreed and ordered Apple to comply before the feds abandoned the search warrant after they said they broke into the phone. In the New York case, the magistrate said the All Writs Act did not apply.

"Nothing in the government's arguments suggests any principled limit on how far a court may go in requiring a person or company to violate the most deeply-rooted values to provide assistance to the government the court deems necessary," US Magistrate Judge James Orenstein ruled.

An Apple attorney told reporters the company was disappointed with the government's move and said the government was trying to set a legal precedent.