This interesting argument does not hold water with me. Not at all.

The Court has lawfully ordered that this property may be seized and searched, on probable cause that it may provide evidence of relevance to a case involving mass-murder.

Apple, as the manufacturer of that device and the provider of all the software on it (specifically included the mechanisms which now prevent access to "that which is to be searched,") IMHO does have a legal duty, IMHO, to comply with the Court, and to provide no hinderance to what the Court has ordered to be done.

This is an active criminal investigation, and "time is of the essence" in any such proceeding.

Apple is reasonably capable of providing the means by which the data-files on the phone can be removed from it and placed into the possession of the FBI. It is also reasonably capable of providing tools that would then be necessary to determine (if it is actually necessary to determine ...) which of 10,000 possible codes was used to protect it, and to do so in a matter of seconds while providing no possible harm to the data (evidence). Federal criminal investigators are not computer scientists. They can, IMHO, order you to render timely assistance so that they can complete their work timely, and if you refuse to do so, you are "obstructing justice."

No, a search warrant does not authorize you to break into your neighbor's house, but it does authorize your neighbor's house to be broken into so that particular things can be searched-for, and seized if they are found. And, if it is determined that the house is protected by a defensive mechanism that you made, IMHO it is also perfectly reasonable that you be compelled to render assistance. The Public's interests, that a heinous crime be solved by the officers that the Public has tasked with doing so, and the Court's expectation that the warrant should be carried-out with reasonable despatch, may not be stymied by your opinion.

This is not the same thing as "making a back-door into a civilian encryption system." It is a mechanism, designed and constructed by Apple, which is intended to provide protection against casual theft of a device. The Constitutionally-defined right of "reasonable search and seizure," when conducted according to the limits set forth in that Supreme Law of the Land™ and quite-obviously in the Public interest, is not to be denied. The Public has the right for a multiple-murder to be solved, if it can be solved, and as I said, "time is of the essence" in any criminal investigation.

The Court's warrant "particularly describes the thing to be searched, etc." and therefore clearly applies to this phone. Although this warrant does not specifically apply to "all future warrants," it is in my view also reasonable that the Public should not experience unnecessary hinderance and delay in the fulfillment of any warrant of this type. A warrant is still required, however, and it is not appropriate to provide the means by which a citizen's "effects" can be searched surreptitiously without one.

The single Constitutional sentence, as usual, has two parts: the public has a right, and, so does the Government. If one of my loved ones was among the people who were murdered, I would be growling: "shut up and get on with it."

I know nothing about libertarian hoops and not being a libertarian, don't believe I would know or recognize libertarian hoops in any event. I can tell you this, however; When 14 people are dead, it is all the more important to be, and act like, a lawyer. The rule of law is for everyone, and for all times.

As Robert Bolt so nicely put it in "A Man for All Seasons" -- which I earnestly recommend to all to read:

**********************
"Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!

More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and if you cut them down — and you're just the man to do it — d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake."

**********************

And this volley from Act II is one of my favorites, particularly as to those who would condemn Apple:

**********************

More: I will not take the oath. I will not tell you why I will not.

Norfolk: Then your reasons must be treasonable!

More: Not "must be;" may be.

Norfolk: It's a fair assumption!

More: The law requires more than an assumption; the law requires a fact.
*************************

And you will find a thousand American examples in the law of the need for being a lawyer when others are dead.

Sundial (should I call you Roper?), I am not a computer geek. You are not a lawyer. Your opinion as to what a third party can be compelled to do, and his crime for refusing is as informed as mine would be in telling a computer programmer or engineer what to do with a computer to accomplish a particular task.

As for your growling, trust me; if one of your kin (or mine) was involved, the law would immediately disqualify you (or me) from making any decisions whatsoever about the matter, for precisely that reason.

I recommended that people read James Otis's oration Against Writs of Assistance from 1761, where he spoke against writs of general assistance. I do so again. Sing and dance all you want. Apple is a third party. Apple is being ordered to create something that does not exist. The thing to be created is a back door. Apple has rightly said "No."

"No, kindly, do not 'call me' anything." "Because, the moment that you do, you declare me less than Human, even as you declare Lawyers to be superior to all Humans."

First of all, let us dispense with the preliminaries:

James Otis (whoever he was ...) died "more-or-less 180 years ago." Any connection between "whatever he may have said 'back then,'" and whatever might be relevant now in the 21st Century, is altogether "a perfectly modern invention." This is not an issue of "computer hacking," and the disparity between our two respective professions does not invalidate my point-of-view with respect to yours.

"Fourteen people are dead, at the hands of a murderer." A murderer who "happened to, at the time, have been working for an employer who gave him an iPhone."

I know dozens of people who, right now, "are working for an employer who gave them an iPhone." None of these people are mass murderers.

And, I am quite sure, none of said employers 'gave them an iPhone' in anticipation of protecting them in their future murder-rampages!

(Neither, I am equally 'quite sure,' did Apple Computer!)

"Yes, Apple is being ordered to provide" ... not 'a thing,' ... not (specifically) 'a [universal] back door' ... but: 'the means to comply with a Search Warrant.' Said Warrant having been lawfully issued by the Court.

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Nope, I am quite unmoved by the opinions of those who lived 250+ years ago, "as though the intervening centuries had nary existed, or had been relevant."

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and ... I remain quite unmoved with regards to exactly why "this supposedly-deep Legal Question" should be allowed to stymie the resolution of a most-gruesome(!) murder.

Furthermore: "a 'crypto back-door' to a four-digit passcode?!" Seriously?...

Some important voices got added to the discussion over the last day or so:

Richard Clarke:
http://www.npr.org/2016/03/14/470347...sm-clarke-says

John Oliver:
https://youtu.be/zsjZ2r9Ygzw

By your logic, then, we should throw out the Constitution, Magna Carta, Bill of Rights, Mayflower Compact, and anything else written or spoken by "dead guys" more than 180 years ago. Wow. Just wow.

No, I simply reject the argument that "Apple has been ordered to create something that does not exist: a back door." First of all, I fully expect that such a thing does exist, if for no more reason than to resurrect the files from a phone whose, say, screen-display has failed. Second, you must reasonably comply with a criminal investigation. Once the files have been extracted from the phone, 10,000 possible keys can be tried in under ten seconds' time. A heinous crime might remain unsolved, and might even be repeated, if you "get your panties in a knot" and cart your case off to the Supreme Court ... a process which could take years. Meanwhile, every criminal will know exactly where and how to safeguard the details of their next caper: "Put it on an iPhone. Even the FBI can't legally touch it there!"

Nearly everything that can be talked-about pragmatically has two sides. Rules written hundreds of years ago are interpreted and re-interpreted in the present. None of the technology we're talking about here even existed three years ago, as this is a fairly recent iPhone feature. As a society, we are making-up the new rules of engagement as we go along ... deciding what to do with all this new stuff, and where the boundaries should properly lie.

I do not believe that anything that you might have in your pocket is sacrosanct; is immune from the principles of search and seizure. I also do not believe that the manufacturer of such devices, when asked to render assistance, can stymie the proceedings of the Court, or of its criminal investigators.

Apple's position on this matter ... seems very odd ... to me. They seem to be quite-vehemently arguing a position that does not make sense to me. I still don't "buy" their purported reasons. I think they're arguing that something "must require an act of God, and God's own authorization," that is properly trivial.

Oh btw, the "does the dead murderer have any rights?" question is completely irrelevant here. I'm surprised that multiple posters have brought it up as if it meant something.

The "dead murderer" is just a pariah upon society who, we now know, never should have been allowed to exist. Society, today, does not give a damn about "his rights," because he murdered 14 people.

"Society," today, should be gladly(!) doing everything in its collective power(!) to make damn(!) sure that this pond-scum's worthless devisings are fully understood, such that there may be zero possibility that there might be other scum that might follow him. And, to be certain that 14 grieving families ... who just wanted their loved ones to come home and have dinner and a movie ... may have justice.

Maybe, closure.

"Yeah, at the end of the day, it is not(!) 'just about abstract cryptographic and Libertarian principles." That is to say ... "Like it or not, there are t-w-o sides to this damned coin, and we must, going forward, co-exist with b-o-t-h of them."

There happen to be human beings here. And, did anyone stop to mention that fourteen of those human beings are now ... dead?!

The FBI has the phone. Now they want to compel someone else to get the data off the phone. If they were to be successful at compelling a third party to get the data for this one phone, they would be able to compel any manufacturer to get any data off of any device. Yeah, I understand the public hysteria over this one phone, but giving the government the power to compel acts by those not party to a crime is not something we ever want to do. There's a term for that: "police state". It never works out well for the general population.

But, there seems to me to be a gross misunderstanding of the actual problem. From what little I've heard, the data is in a black box (I don't know whether that's hardware or software) and if the retry limit is exceeded, the data is erased. There is a maxim in computing that if you have access to the hardware, you have the keys. How can it be beyond the capabilities of the FBI, the NSA, and whatever computing experts they have access to in industry to clone this device repeatedly until they are able to brute-force the data?

Let's not forget that the government is not asking for a back door to the encryption key on this device. They are trying to compel Apple to create new code to extract an encrypted file from the phone. Surely, if you have the phone in your hands, you can extract a file?

Guess what! I daresay that someone at FBI (or their ten-year old daughter ...) has finally told them that they can get the data off the phone. As I said in another thread, there has to be a tool to "clone" ... that is to say, to retrieve data off of ... a phone whose touch-screen just got smashed. (Drop your precious phone onto the pavement from a distance of pocket-height, and you'll see for yourself how fragile the things actually are.)

And, yeah, "the US Federal Bureau of Investigation," upon securing a lawful search warrant from the US Court, and in compliance with that warrant, does have(!) the right to "search and seize." Therefore, it does have the right to request ... and to obtain ... reasonable technical assistance from any manufacturer (or programmer), towards those lawful ends.

The data on this device is protected only by a pass-code, designed to make the device useless to a casual airport-bathroom thief. Once the data has been transferred from the device, anything concerning "drop-dead" no longer applies. The mechanism sensibly assumes that an airport thief probably does not also work at an Apple retail store or service center.

Once they have the phone, they have the phone. Why do you insist that they have the right and the power to compel others to do their work for them once they have the phone? They don't. To insist otherwise would be to insist that the government can compel a third party to perform work for the government that the government is unwilling or unable to accomplish - all the while insisting that the third party is not acting as a representative of the government, and thus is a de facto government entity. All of this is just wrong-headed. The government does not have the constitutional power to compel a third party to act on its behalf.

A search warrant does not give the government the power to come into your office and compel your employees to become government employees. Sorry. No. You've got your data. It's right there in your hands. Find someone else who is WILLING to dive into the dumpster for you if you like. I'm not willing to.

I apologize for double posting to this thread, but perhaps the following will give a better illustration of why the government does not have the power it seeks:

You are a landlord. You have been renting a house to someone and now the government has arrested this person on charges of making meth in your house. Can the government compel you to go into the house and search for the equipment to make meth? No. Can the government compel you to run the equipment found in the house to see if it can produce meth? No. Can the government compel you to load the meth lab into its trucks so it can take it away? Once again, no. You, as the landlord are not a party to the crime. As such, your responsibility ends when you have opened the door, assuming they didn't kick it in.

Now, let's say you are an automobile manufacturer and the police have arrested someone who has bought a car from you. Can you, the manufacturer, be compelled to search the car? No. The government may be able to compel you to provide them the keycodes for that VIN number, assuming that you have them on hand. But, if they want a key made, they will have to hire a willing locksmith. They can't compel you, the manufacturer, to come to the car and figure out the keycodes necessary to make a key to fit the door.

You can construct the system such that it's very difficult (though never completely impossible) to extract the keys, e.g. smartcards.

Did you miss the news where the FBI did finally manage to access the data? Also, I think it was always assumed that the NSA would have no trouble doing this, but it wasn't their investigation.

No, I did not miss that. The point is that it's not Apple's problem. It's the government's problem. The same would be true if my company manufactured safes of the type where the customer can change the combination. As the manufacturer, it would not be my responsibility, nor could the government compel me, to figure out the combination that the customer had set. That's the government's problem, not mine.