America is entirely being driven by fear and anger. The current presidential race is a perfect reflection of the hate, anger, and fear that Americans believe exists. The system is a reflection of what the "good" people allow to happen.
The FBI has a job, and Apple has a commitment to its customers. Technology is going to get more advanced, does that mean that we should let it be a tool to obstruct justice. You may not trust the people tasked with the investigation, but people should also look at the fact that the encryption here is obstructing justice.
Tomorrow if a criminal kidnaps a bus of school children and the police are able to get a hold of a locked phone that holds their location, would you be as opposed to the current situation?
The creation of a method to disable the phones encryption is a slippery road, but the option of not aiding the FBI is also a slippery road. This is a organization created to protect the people.
We need to have a open discourse on how the information can be taken off this phone while minimizing the loss of public security and privacy . This is not a black and white issue like many people are treating it.
And just to make it clear, I do agree that the government has done extremely questionable things as well as committed offenses against the publics privacy. We need to fix the issue of distrust, because a lack of trust in our system is equal to cancer within a body.
Second, our system is essentially set up to make me powerless. It's actually engineered that way. I do what I can to educate people around me, but when it comes to voting or having any control over who's in office or who officiates our most important government positions, the ball's not just not in our court, it's on another planet.
Technology, as you said, will continue to get much more advanced. I reckon at some point, literally every moment of our lives will be perfectly catalogued, from birth to death. This is why what Mr. Comey wants scares me so much, because you can practically hear him salivating in that letter.
We have guarantees built into our constitutional freedoms, and one of the most important guarantees is that the government can't compel us to do things. Sure, there are laws to maintain the peace and common order, but you don't have to house or attend to military in your home, you don't have to testify against yourself, you're not compelled by police to follow their wishes until you're under arrest (which they ostensibly can't do without probable cause), and you don't have to aide in an investigation if you're not involved. These are vital because the moment we're legally compelled to aide investigators, all bets are off. We are no longer able to even protect ourselves against undue search and seizure.
Look at history. The encryption the Nazis had created helped them commit terrible acts of war and it was the backdoor the Allies discovered that helped bring justice to them.
I'm being devils advocate here because I don't people should view this as "us vs them". Comey may seem like he is salivating to you, but he does raise the notion that at the other end is a corporation, who also has an agenda.
Are you suggesting the Nazi's were the only ones to use encryption during World War II?
You forgot to mention at least 9 other nations (including the USA)
This is a two way street.
So can literally anything in the wrong hands, though.
No, it isn't. The phone they're trying to break into was the shooter's work phone, provided by his employer. He physically destroyed his personal phone before the acts in question. The idea that he kept relevant information on his work phone, which he left intact, is absurd.
Did the shooter take the phone with him when meeting with accomplices? If so, perhaps there's GPS info on the phone.
What are the gaps in standard behavior (i.e. phone turned off...). Are these times where the FBI should dig deeper to discover the actions of the shooter?
The idea that bulk collection of metadata is objectionable is something we're seeing in civilized technical circles. Individual collection of the same is even worse.
(What the probability is though is hard for me to predict as I don't have enough information, but assuming he didn't have any slip ups on his work phone is a bad assumption. If there is a 1 percent chance that future attacks of similar scope could be prevented by knowledge gathered about this case, is it not our obligation to find out? Its a complex issue that the courts and media will play out over the next few months)
Of course encryption will obstruct justice in some cases. The same applies equally to the 4th amendment. Sometimes criminals will escape justice because the means to identify them are simply not reasonable. Obstructing justice is not always considered a bad thing. Where we draw the line is crucially important.
The law demands that the particulars of the crime are irrelevant. We must accept that whatever capability we give police can be deployed, with probable cause, in any criminal investigation. So I'll completely ignore your hypothetical case. If bypassing encryption is possible, then bypassing encryption becomes routine. Apple was routinely tasked under the AWA to assist in recovering phone data prior to them deploying encryption which they believed they could not crack.
Worse still is the fact that all police powers will be, at times, abused by the police. So another important question is are you comfortable with this capability being used disproportionately against the poor and marginalized, being used to harass and intimidate, and being used to suppress political dissent?
I believe the police must be capable of working with some limitations on their ability to access our personal electronic devices. Compelling manufacturers to create backdoors in our devices to bypass their security might help the police solve cases, but it would do at an unacceptable risk to the security and privacy of everyone who uses those devices. Generally available and widely usable encryption is a vital national interest. It is the linchpin enabling trillions of dollars of electronic commerce. Even if you dilude yourself into thinking the backdoor would only be lawfully accessed, its mere existence would inflict real economic damage by furthering global distrust of American technology. And it would set the stage for even more troubling backdoors in the future, because the All Writs Act is the wrong legal framework for them to get it.
Under the AWA, how is compelling the creation of this backdoor any different from compelling creation of any software which might produce evidence of co-conspirators? If tomorrow the FBI wants access to an iPhone 6s's camera and microphone, or the ability to remotely download the phone's contents? What if the FBI needs Mozilla to install a backdoor in the Tor Browser Bundle? How can the AWA grant one backdoor and not the other?
I'd love to live in a world where I trusted a government, which is supposed to be a composition of its people, more than a profit-motivated, self-interested business, but in some weird turn of events, something vastly different has festered in the last 15 years. You blew it, you asshole, you and every other cop.