The whole Apple/FBI fracas is about promoting smartphones as the centre of our universe: the confluence of medical, financial, and all other personal information. If Apple can convince us that smartphones are secure, there are lucrative opportunities for smartphone technology to become ubiquitous and pervasive in our lives.
Unfortunately, it will always be necessary for law enforcement to have access to bad guys' stuff. The Fourth Amendment guarantees your privacy, but police can break down your door and seize your financial and medical records if they have reasonable grounds to suspect you. Why should your smartphone be different?
The smartphone is not an inalienable right. We are confusing convenience with fundamental rights; technology with entitlement.
If you don't trust your smartphone to be impregnable, then guess what? Don't put your medical & financial info on your smartphone. There was an epoch when we actually did banking & medicine without smartphones.
Apple, unlock the terrorist's iPhone, and resign yourself to a reduction in sales.
> The Fourth Amendment guarantees your privacy, but police can break down your door and seize your financial and medical records if they have reasonable grounds to suspect you. Why should your smartphone be different?
This is a false dichotomy. Simply because technology creates a situation where governments can't access a users data without the user consent. Apple's technology hadn't reached this point in this case (aka end-to-end encryption), which is why we're even having this conversation but we've arguably passed that point as an industry where that will be the future legal environment.
It's entirely plausible Apple could create an iPhone that they can't unlock, or iMessages they can't read. So then it's no longer about coercing middlemen but the US gov vs user consent. Outside of self-incrimination this changes the legal question to be about unlocking every persons medical/financial records, not about unlocking a single persons.
The only path the government has is to coerce Apple into making backdoors or purposefully weakening their encryption for all devices which affects every Americans fourth amendment rights - as well as public saftey.
Therefore this is not just about one person in a criminal trial - since a backdoor can never be made only for a single court case, it will by nature unlock the phones to any party who can create or get access to the backdoor.
So the only legal path for the government is to either coerce suspects into self-incrimination by forcing them to unlock their phones or prevent Apple/Google/etc customers from being able to meaningfully lock their phones in the first place. The problem with the latter is that criminals/terrorists won't be forced to use the backdoored Apple/Google/etc technology but can use open-source versions with encryption to side-step law enforcement's efforts - making it ultimately ineffective as a legal strategy.
> The Fourth Amendment guarantees your privacy, but police can break down your door and seize your financial and medical records if they have reasonable grounds to suspect you. Why should your smartphone be different?
One problem with this analogy is that the police don't mandate that everyone's door be easy to break down and thereby make all houses easier to burglarize. Another is that you know when someone has broken down your door.
If phones must have back doors, those back doors will become known to others besides the US Government. Imagine if every time you traveled abroad, you knew that airport security could take your phone and get all the data on it, or maybe add malware.
> If you don't trust your smartphone to be impregnable, then guess what? Don't put your medical & financial info on your smartphone. There was an epoch when we actually did banking & medicine without smartphones.
You can say the same thing about laptops, or even paper files. "You're not allowed to take effective security measures to protect your info because we might want it" is a bad policy.
> but police can break down your door and seize your financial and medical records if they have reasonable grounds to suspect you.
But this isn't the police's right, it's our right(s) that we're voluntarily ceding to the government such that it can practically provide us our basic security.
> Why should your smartphone be different?
Because it is different. I can't backup a car, or encrypt one, etc. Traditional possessions didn't record your GPS location and didn't contain all your private and banking info and couldn't be turned into remote listening devices and so forth.
So far we're seeing traditional law enforcement having a pretty good record against even high-tech criminals. They caught DPR with legwork and correlating multiple tails to figure out who was who. Even though he took extreme measures most of the time a few mistakes took him down.
So, with the thought in mind that nobody fights harder than for their budget, we should have discussions with our security forces and reevaluate our needs; see just how much of the physical world's laws usefully translate and what needs to be revamped. Evaluate what we can reasonably hope to achieve at what cost.
The laws don't own us, we own them. The discussion needs to be "What should the laws say?".
Unfortunately, it will always be necessary for law enforcement to have access to bad guys' stuff. The Fourth Amendment guarantees your privacy, but police can break down your door and seize your financial and medical records if they have reasonable grounds to suspect you. Why should your smartphone be different?
The smartphone is not an inalienable right. We are confusing convenience with fundamental rights; technology with entitlement.
If you don't trust your smartphone to be impregnable, then guess what? Don't put your medical & financial info on your smartphone. There was an epoch when we actually did banking & medicine without smartphones.
Apple, unlock the terrorist's iPhone, and resign yourself to a reduction in sales.