WASHINGTON — A Brooklyn jurist has scolded the government in a stinging rebuke of arguments it has used to shame Apple for refusing to surrender information from its customers’ iPhones, saying it’s stretching a 1789 law to get “impermissibly absurd results.”

The ruling Monday by U.S. Magistrate Judge James Orenstein in Brooklyn came a day before a Tuesday congressional hearing that will include testimony from FBI Director James Comey and Apple General Counsel Bruce Sewell on encryption and “balancing Americans’ security and privacy.”

Orenstein, ruling in a Brooklyn drug case, noted his decision was not controlling in over a dozen cases nationwide facing the same legal question but “can nevertheless have some precedential value.”

He seemed to be aiming in particular at Apple’s fight against a California judge’s order that it create specialized software to help the FBI hack into an iPhone linked to the investigation of the Dec. 2 San Bernardino, California, attack.

Orenstein belittled some government arguments in both cases, saying it was stretching an old law “to produce impermissibly absurd results.”

He rejected government claims that Apple was concerned only with public relations. He said he found no limit on how far the government would go to require a person or company to violate deeply-rooted values.

And he said claims that Apple must assist the government because it reaped the benefits of being an American company “reflects poorly on a government that exists in part to safeguard the freedom of its citizens.”