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Comment by ajamesm | Hacker News Reader

the "Apple should unlock the phone" part

"Apple Inc. has received and objected to or challenged at least 11 orders"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI–Apple_encryption_dispute

I'm not sure what I'm missing here. The position of the government was pretty clear that "Apple should unlock the phone," until the FBI did it independently.

Personally, I agree with Apple's position. Security requires trust, and Apple showed good reason to trust them, enough that I went out and bought an iPhone.

But I have no idea how Trump agreeing with the courts and the FBI shows some kind of radical new threat.

That Apple saga was quite an interesting view into American politics. If you ask me, Trump and a lot of the government is out of touch with Privacy rights. The opposite battle is taking place with free speech in Canada[0], with the government wanting to curtail free speech in the name of preferred pronouns referencing gender. In both cases, the Government wants to harm free speech, but I think many people who are against it in Apple's case would be for it in Canada's. I could be wrong though.

[0] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37875695

It's an interesting parallel you draw. In one case, Canadian students played pranks on an out-of-touch professor, and in the other, the incoming presidential administration in America is taking actions that have historically preceded mass deportation and genocide, both in the sense of "necessary" and "sufficient". Not to say the two aren't directly comparable -- though the queer kids are real dark horses vis-a-vis establishing and normalizing concentration camps.

Perhaps the lesson to draw is that, really, we're all authoritarians in some degree. Some of us want our uncle to stop saying the N-word at the Thanksgiving dinner table, some of us don't identify with our assigned gender and lash out at the opposition with responses of disproportional magnitude, and some of us want to classify people by religion and detain them. America truly is a melting pot.

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