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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

I'm staying with a friend who is is retired LEO, and he strongly believes Apple should/must comply. He wants big jail time if they don't.

He thinks a it's a matter of safety because terrorists. 14 people were killed, therefore the ends justify the means as you say.

We got into it the other night, and I think the case boils down to if we should be allowed to have secrets from the - secrets the government can never unlock, no matter what. he feels strongly that we should not be permitted to do so, because when a legal warrant is written, the government must have access to everything.

He also doesn't believe the Snowden leaks, and thinks that when it comes to the pursuit of justice, the government should be trusted with everything.

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> He also doesn't believe the Snowden leaks, and thinks that when it comes to the pursuit of justice, the government should be trusted with everything.

Not believing the Snowden leaks is akin to denying the Holocaust IMO.

It's completley delusional to reject the validity of empirical evidence on the basis that it does not align with your preferred political narrative.

> Not believing the Snowden leaks is akin to denying the Holocaust IMO.

The parent's wording may have been off. My parsing of "He also doesn't believe the Snowden leaks" inferred a missing "were justified".

Then again, I could see a few different interpretations. We need a clarifying phrase after "doesn't believe the Snowden leaks", like "doesn't believe the Snowden leaks were justified" or "doesn't believe the Snowden leaks tell the whole story". One parsing is "doesn't believe the Snowden leaks are legitimate and authentic".

To clarify:

He doesn't believe that what Snowden leaked is true.

He doesn't believe the NSA is recording internet traffic / phone calls etc.

He doesn't believe multiple global intelligence agencies are working together to gather as much information as physically possible.

In short, he doesn't believe the NSA, etc. are doing the things Snowden said they're doing.

(Yes, I showed him the classified slides, he still doesn't believe it's true)

I'm not sure where you can justify inferring that extra information. From what you've described, the context simply doesn't exist outside of your mind.

A case I heard recently is that if a undercover CIA operative was captured in e.g. China (with an iPhone), should Apple be compelled to break the security if demanded by the Chinese government?

Compelled by whom?

Setting aside patriotism, seems like that's a choice between the less painful of the consequences of a) non compliance set by the Chinese government vs b) the cost of _compliance_ set by the US government.

EDIT: Also, why would the CIA ever entrust their communications and data to a format/device that could be cracked by a commercial entity that could be subject to the above scenario?

I think people would argue that since Apple is not a Chinese company they'd be ok with Apple ignoring the request.

I'm sure Apple could just set up its iPhone production lines somewhere else in no time at all, right?

Ask your friend how that's any better or safer than what the East German Republic did to its people under the Stasi. If he tries to dodge then I'm gonna say he's not much of a friend. When it comes to protecting the rights of others which includes their privacy I would probably have cut that person off day one. I'm a bit of an extremist to be sure, but some things are more precious than a friend and freedom, IMO, is one of them.

Thanks for writing -

The 'legal warrants' part that you said is interesting. I'm not sure I'd heard that thought clearly articulated. The idea that when a legal warrant is issued the Gov't should have access to everything. Something to consider.

OK - thanks for the input!

This is not really a new issue though. If a guy has a safe in his house and the cops get a warrant to search his house, they'll ask him what the code to the safe is. At that point he can tell them, or tell them he doesn't know and got it at a yard sale and was hoping to crack it one day. Of course I guess they could just take a diamond cutter to it at point. Can't really do that with software (barring quantum computers).

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