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Comment by jamescun | Hacker News Reader

This is possibly the worst outcome. The tide of public opinion was turning towards Apple and privacy, and away from the FBI; for it to enter the court under this pretence there was a strong argument to be made against the latter. With this announcement, for the many, this matter will now be "resolved". When it inevitably rears its ugly head again, the same pretence may no longer be true.

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I think I know what you mean but don't forget there is a specific and horrible case here too. Many people died and now the FBI has access to the phone. I don't know what the odds are that they will find anything useful in way of easing the pain of the victims or preventing an occurrence, but certainly it seems highly plausible. And at the very least a lot of resources going into this part of the investigation can now be used elsewhere. They were able to access the phone and (hopefully) it required some expensive physical+software breaks, which seems to be a reasonable compromise in the privacy vs security debate.

I think this is a great outcome.

Most people believe the chances of the phone containing anything of value are very slim.

Odds may be slim of there being anything newsworthy on the phone but do you think that it wouldn't be of value to the investigative team, who probably has to chase down hundreds of leads, contacts, and so forth? Unless the phone was wiped, I would be 99% confident that the team doing the actual investigation will get immense value from this phone, even if it's just tying up many loose ends.

They already had the 6-week-old iCloud backup from the device. Don't forget as well that this was a work phone, the personal phone was destroyed, which suggests there's nothing of interest on the work phone (presumably just info related to work).

You're right, I perhaps was a little callous with my disregard of the specifics of the case rather than focus on the larger potential precedent.

There are a huge number of side effects that would have to be dealt with, but this case has made me think that Apple should have the option to say, "changed your mind? Nooo, that ship (which you, the FBI, built and christened) has sailed, buddy, and you're on board. This is going before a judge, like it or not, and we're doing it now."

They would have to make a claim against the DoJ. A party (the DoJ) has the right to drop their claim.

Except that's not how courts work. Apple is the defendant, the government is the plaintiff. The plaintiff should always have the right to end a case/action. Allowing defendant's to continue cases allows for highly malicious actions to occur.

Oh? It seems to me that in this case, allowing the government to discontinue its trumped-up case is what has allowed the "highly malicious actions".

Did I not say that there were side effects? :-) I realize this has problems, and I'm not the one to be providing solutions. However, "nuisance lawsuits" are a thing, and this case is probably the poster child. Only instead of "pay me and I'll go away", it's "we'll keep trying until we feel the tide of public opinion turns against us, then we'll pull out and try again...repeatedly." I don't know, just doesn't seem like the way things should work. You either have a case or not, public opinion be damned.

So fine, defendant doesn't get to push continuing the case. Then how about FBI doesn't get to try again? Of course, problem there is that the next will be ensured to be just different enough to not fall under whatever regulation or law is set up to deal with such a thing.

More malicious than being forced to defend yourself, at significant cost, only to say "Nah, changed our mind"? So, plaintiffs can force issues, defendants cannot. And to let them would be malicious?

Give a specific example of something the defense could do that is malicious to the plaintiff?

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