Live from the Panopticon: I must say that the Obama Administration and the FBI seem to me to be being profoundly stupid here.
The game is whether other governments can go to Apple and say: You helped one Westphalian sovereignty with its internal-security problems, you have to help us. If the U.S. takes a strong stance for privacy here, the likely shape of the world a century hence is better:
: That Apple FBI Back_Door Thing: "Apple has quite rightly made the point that not only does this break company security and therefore customer privacy...
...but that if they create an exploit for the FBI, the vulnerability will be used by the likes of Putin and various repressive regimes. Less obvious is that the public fact of Apple having done this for US law enforcement would put its employees in other countries at risk. ‘You helped them, why don’t you help us; we know where your daughter goes to school’ kind of thing. (This isn’t hypothetical. I know someone this happened to. If it’s a choice between turning off a chunk of the Internet or facing down the rather fidgety men who have arrived in your kitchen in the middle of the night wielding semi-automatic weapons, well, it’s not really a choice, is it?) So when Apple says it has designed and encrypted its OS ‘so it’s not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running iOS 8,’ the audience for Apple’s stance isn’t wholly or perhaps even largely American. This is why Apple has been publicly backed by other US-born but global tech firms Google, Twitter and Facebook...
