they don't play by their own set of rules.
The Israel == Guantanamo thing doesn't exactly make sense to me either, but now you're arguing nonsense. Certainly, we all know that the government, including law enforcement, doesn't always follow the law.
That's almost the entire argument for putting any limits on governmental power at all.
(That's not to say we should restrict them from doing this, though; if they can crack a phone, good for them, I suppose. But it's another thing to be concerned about.)
Here, the "Israel == Guantanamo" thing doesn't make sense if you assume that the government is using the Israeli hacks to break iPhones it has in custody because of a warrant or arrest. You can speculate that the government is stealing peoples' iPhones and breaking into them without a warrant, but it's an actual logical fallacy to point to different things the government is doing to argue that the government is doing this thing too.
Well, OK, now you know:
The US government seizes phones and laptops, "without showing reasonable suspicion of a crime or getting a judge’s approval", on a regular basis, and has done so for a number of years.
https://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/laptop-seizure-border...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/16/canadian_privacy_co...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/technology/aclu-border-pa...
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25458533
(et fuckin' cetera...)
You might not like it, but border searches aren't illegal, and the government doesn't need to go to Israel to do them.
> This technology isn’t being used to break into phones at surprise checkpoints, it’s being used to search phones of people who have been arrested.
and:
> As far as I know, the government isn’t stealing peoples iPhones to search them.
That implies it's nothing to worry about if you aren't being arrested, which is wrong.
First, you don't know when this technology is being used. It would be prudent to assume they US government could use this technology on any phone they seize.
Second, even if it's not "stealing" when government agents seize your phone at a border (or yes, at a surprise checkpoint, which they can and do use), from a security standpoint, it's the same thing.
The legality of these searches is not that interesting to me (witch-burning and slavery were legal too). What's interesting is that this new exploit, assuming the story is accurate, allows the government to search the data of phones that they seize.
Why should we worry about that? Because, as we have already established, they seize phones routinely, and not necessarily in conjunction with an arrest or even suspicion of criminality.
Yes, it's legal (in many cases, anyway). But before this new phone-cracking capability, it probably wasn't effective. The security on the Apple iPhone was believed to be good enough to stop such intrusion; now (again, assuming this article is accurate) we know it isn't.