If the FBI gets into the "terrorist's" iPhone, they'll get into yours

[Warren DeMontague]

104. bottom line in the context of the FBI, etc, they have given very little reason for people to trust

them at their word.

And it is undeniable that they have had a bone to pick with apple's end-user encryption since it was implemented. I simply do not believe that a) whatever is on this now-deceased person's phone; which I suspect the government already has a good idea about, anyway- is worth the extraordinary effort they're putting into it, other than they want to either establish a precedent OR obtain by any means necessary the tools or knowhow to get around this encryption scheme they don't like... and b) I think the principle of privacy and security is a valid one for a number of reasons already laid out- I am going to proudly side with not just Silicon Valley but also the EFF on these matters, every time.

I believe law enforcement can keep us safe just fine without having to have a magic key into everyone's shit; and it's worth noting that even when they do have these near-omniscient powers they keep demanding, again, they DON'T use them to keep us safe, but like I said, they use em to go after low level drug users.

The Feds or the NSA dont need super secret illegal powers to spy on El Chapo, anyway. It's the person smoking the bong in their basement (or the journalist that has written the article deemed 'subversive') that are the focal points of these, again, extra-legal and extra-constitutional activities. And honestly we all should have learned these lessons long ago, from J. Edgar Hoover, Nixon, and COINTELPRO.

And on that note, I'm sure there are a variety of philosophical points one could take on the issue of privacy vs. security in the case of a terrorist's cell phone, but I do not know how anyone can argue at this point in time that the authoritarian wet dream known as the drug war, en masse, has been anything except a giant taxpayer funded clusterfuck, a failure, and a cruel disaster that has devastated lives and taken a big ol' invasive crap on our constitutional rights in the process. The violence associated with "the drug trade" is, almost exclusively, a function of prohibition just as al capone and tommygun wielding gangsters grew out of the 21st Amendment.