stevedownunder

Normal customer service call : Normal Customer : "Apple can you help ?" Apple : "We've had a look, the answer is No we can't help." Normal Customer : "Ok, thanks for trying." This 'normal service call' US Government : "Apple can you help ?" Apple : "We've sent people down, we've given you advice and you ignored it. That's all we can do." US Government : "Tough, we want in & we're gonna lie to the Media and Public, until you relent and sue you because we want to spy on the world." US Government to everyone : "Our quadruple billions of NSA money used to spy on everyone in world can't get into the iPhone and we really need to look 'just this once'. Trust us we won't ever need it again (other than all the other cases we're pursuing quietly), we're the guardians of liberty and privacy." Everyone : "I think Not, we've heard this before and heard testimony to congress that you promised you weren't spying on us, then we found out you were. Once bitten..."

The Washington Post is today reporting that the DoJ want to decrypt a further dozen phones (but the DoJ is being quiet about it) none of which are anything to do with Terrorism but the FBI just want one looked at. NCIS (I watch TV) probably want a few dozen, the CSI will want copies of everything everyone else breaks into and the NSA will just want them all. ...The slippery slope beckons...

Seems like the US politician's pick and choose which part of the US Constitution they want to agree with at the time.

It's a dangerous precedence. In NZ for the dotcom case, the NZ police seized all hard disks after a mass raid on his home. The FBI turned up made copies of the disk before the Judge ruled they must not be given to the FBI since they were illegally seized and may compromised dotcoms defence. FBI meantime already scooted back the US with the copies, but I'm sure they didn't look at them - we have a saying down here "yeah right!". The original house search was deemed illegal, so the politician's changed the law backdating it so it was legal, no-one was ever charged with violating the law as it was. Rule of Thumb says don't trust a politician or anyone who wants to become one.