If I were able to somehow develop a file cabinet that was impenetrable, the government would not be able to come compel me to break it open for them. They are allowed to try to break it open, but they cannot compel me to help them.

(CALEA requires that systems must be built so that the government can snoop. Cell phones aren't covered by CALEA (the network is)).

Second, our devices are becoming effectively cybernetic extensions of our minds, and this cognitive intimacy definitely warrants a new discussion of boundaries that is not burdened by awkward analogies to historic traditions of the courts.

Finally, by whatever basis you want to argue (multiple amendments in the bill of rights, etc.), we should not be forced to deny the effectiveness of mathematics. We should have the right to use whatever algorithmic and physical security mechanisms we desire to guard ourselves against hackers, thieves, and foreign spies. If that slows the local spies down too, they'll just have to find some other way to do their jobs, and reconsider whether the scope and scale of their activities was appropriate to begin with.

I guess I just don't believe this.[1] Courts have always been able to compel say your friend or girlfriend to reveal your darkest secrets--stuff that you'd never even write down--but your text messages should be treated differently? It's not like cognitive intimacy didn't exist before electronic devices.

[1] As far as sci-fi philosophy goes, my go-to is WWHIS (What Would Happen in Star Trek). You think the Federation can't compel someone to assist in decrypting a computer?

I'm also not making an argument from sci-fi, I'm talking about reality today. Star Trek (especially TNG) has a lot of great morality plays and valuable lessons can be learned from it, but the vast majority of the action we see takes place on a military-like vessel and can't inform us about how to structure a total population. But this is all beside the point that we are experiencing the melding of our minds and our devices right now.

And I'm saying I don't buy that. My phone isn't an "extension of my brain" (that's what I'm calling sci-fi philosophy). It's a replacement for my phone, calendar/notebook, and camera, which are all things that have been subject to search with a warrant.

> I also notice you didn't mention spouses, which are treated differently from friends

But not for reasons relevant to your argument. Spousal privilege exists not to protect privacy but to protect marriage. The rationale is that you shouldn't turn spouses on each other. It dates to a time when spouses were considered the same legal person.

I didn't address your point about encryption because I don't disagree with it. But banning encryption isn't directly at issue here.

Star Trek is always relevant. It imagines a future society where people achieve prosperity through a very powerful, sometimes fallible, but basically benevolent government. It's an ode to the righteous power of Institutions. It's a compelling alternative to the anarchic leanings of much of modern sci-fi.

It may not be true for you, but you don't have to buy it for it to be compelling to others. I'm saying that when I and presumably many others use technology, it's not perceived as an external device, but rather a direct extension of our minds and senses. There's no skeuomorphic substitution taking place in our minds.

It's very vaguely analogous to (though much stronger than) a car enthusiast saying that they feel one with the car. A similar concept applies to many other tools humans use as well; people may say "ow!" and grimace in pain when they damage their tools, even though their own flesh wasn't physically harmed.

I use those analogies to suggest that a tool used not by the body but by the mind can have an even stronger integration with the core identity of a person, a connection that must be taken into account by any laws seeking to regulate such tools.

Regarding spouses, I'd make the argument that in a society that doesn't treat a marriage as a single person, privacy is one of the necessary substitutes that society needs to maintain its sanity and achieve the same end of building stable, productive households. So the historic rationale for spousal secrecy should not prevent us from extending the concept to other interactions, perhaps even with non-human parties (like our devices).

I'm glad we can agree about the banning of encryption. Maybe it's not the direct issue in the Apple case we are discussing, but it is a part of the rhetoric being used by (parts of) the government, and does relate to forcing a company to make it easy to break a device's encryption.

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Star Trek is always relevant. It imagines a future society where people achieve prosperity through a very powerful, sometimes fallible, but basically benevolent government. It's an ode to the righteous power of Institutions. It's a compelling alternative to the anarchic leanings of much of modern sci-fi.

It also only works in a post-scarcity, free energy environment. There's often a recurring theme of what happens when a government is corrupt or is infiltrated by outside powers (represented for the sake of fiction as brain-eating parasites). And I'd say Kirk at least has a pretty strong anarchic leaning :-). But it's mostly entertainment, and doesn't provide a blueprint for achieving such a society. I really like Star Trek, but I think in this conversation it's more distracting than it is enlightening.

I think it does. How did the society become post-scarcity and free energy? Teams of scientists working in Federation research labs, Federation programs that make the fruits of that technology available to everyone.

And as far as privacy goes, it probably depends on the series, but in the most Utopian ideal of the Federation, would anyone even use encryption? Surely the desire for secrecy would be considered a form of atavism, something humans would have evolved beyond?

According to you, you see no problem in being compelled by court order in revealing this information. Because terrorism.

I don't believe that any government has the right to compel you to reveal your heart or private thoughts.

Another commenter said that you believe that torture can be justified - so maybe you really do believe that you can be compelled to finally acknowledge that 2 + 2 = 5, and that this is an acceptable outcome.

Your profile indicates that you're a lawyer - so if the court orders you to turn over confidential client files, you have no problem with that?

But that's only "reasonable" to ask of a Bank because bank's are in the business of giving time-limited vaults and thus evicting customers. The customer knows the bank is hard and crunchy on the outside, but sees that once inside the vault their safe-deposit box is only behind sheet-metal walls.

It's not only physically fairly easy, but the bank has the equipment on-site and does the lock-drilling routinely.

Apple is not in the business of cracking hardware security modules. And imagine if they make a mistake under intense media scrutiny and the data is lost forever - they'd take the heat and their reputation would be tarnished forever. It's absolutely unreasonable to ask Apple to take such risk, at great cost, in an area they aren't skilled in or practiced at.

> This is privacy advocates trying to shift the Overton window: where a search pursuant to a valid court order somehow becomes a privacy violation.

If one were to characterize a side's entire message as being a rhetorical trick, I think it would be as easy to say almost exactly the same thing in reverse. You're suggesting that the government can compel pretty much anyone to do anything already so we might as well just codify it and move along.

Privacy advocates are thinking of privacy, not the law. By that I mean, there's a certain amount of liberty people are willing to entrust to the government in trade for protection but many people see the cost to their liberties going up without any protection on the table. Monitoring someone used to take a 24/7 staff and now it's the default setting. There's simply, factually, less privacy.

You keep talking of the delicate and time-tested balance, etc. But consider this - (valid) government rules at the will of the people. The people don't think in terms of law, they think in terms of their needs and want. Privacy is a dial - Safety is a dial - government-surveillance is a consequence.

All precedent bows to the people, and to deny the will of the people because the constitution, statute, and precedent (may) not yet be up to date with that will misses entirely, the point of law and government. It doesn't matter if government has been doing something for 1500 years - if it's not providing a value to the people it's not a power the people need to grant.

There's absolutely no reason not to walk the government's powers back if it can't justify needing them.

We're not talking about some sort of sophisticated crack here. We're talking about commenting out a couple of lines of code and recompiling the OS. The task Apple is being asked to do is technically very very simple.