No emotional equivocation at all. In fact, that was the very first thing I tried to address.
What you spoke about is truly not a future that I would wish upon us. No-one in their right mind would want that.
But there is a very large disconnect between the case at hand here and the possible future you just described.
It is not unprecedented for a government to ask a bank to open the safe of a criminal, or to freeze their funds, or to subpoena emails for use as evidence in court. So why is the phone, a digital safe, so sacred?
This is one phone. A phone from a recently deceased terrorist yes, but one that presumably could have been used during the planning stages of the attack. Who knows where that leads? Would you not want the authorities to follow this lead, after getting a valid warrant from a judge?
I think the emotional backlash over this case has caused fear-mongering to grow, on both sides.
No, it's really quite simple, and I explained it in another thread. The reason that the qualification for violating digital security must be far more stringent comes from the nature of what can be taken and the manner in which it can happen. As others have pointed out, the Fourth Amendment guarantees (not grants, I should note, as it is a right and not a privilege) that an individual shall be secure in their person or effects unless agents of the state are granted a warrant issued from evidence given under oath and affirmation, i.e. given with evidence and sworn statement. I also grant that the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court has also established the exigent circumstances doctrine.
These points being established, we must take into account the nature of personal effects. By any reasonable estimation, a personal effect is a material object which you have produced yourself or of which you have taken possession have reaching agreeable compensation by the producer or previous owner. Then we have the notion of papers,
which stands as an elaboration of personal effects. Why? Because it speaks to the heart of the two-part privacy criteria descending from the Fourth Amendment, namely that there must be, one, an expectation of privacy, and two, that privacy is reasonably possible. The reason that this is important is because one's papers, and especially one's communication, carries with it the obvious intention of privacy beyond those parties which are so-labelled in origination and destination. This is law, for instance, in both traditional postal mail and email.
What permits true privacy in one's papers, at least in traditional modes of jurisprudence, is the combination of three things: uniqueness, destructibility and inaccessibility. Those things which carry an expectation of privacy are those things which have the reasonable expectation of relative unqiueness (only a particular number of persons have copies and are known to the originator), inaccessibility (the article in question is not accessible via unaided apprehension and can be secured), and destructibility (if you so desire, you can, for reasons of ensuring privacy, destroy the papers in question). Digital effects are capable of all of these, but they are also capable of being subverted far more easily
The problem is that digital effects can, with efforts like those currently being undertaken by the FBI, violated in far more insidious ways than your traditional effects. With the tool they demand Apple produce, they can, and will if PRISM is any indication, access our digital effects with relative ease and we
would never know about it. We would have no indication of their interest in us, knowledge of their possession of our person effects, or have reasonable opportunity to engage legal counsel and further protect our rights.
This is not fear-mongering, it is a real and reasonable reaction a government whose tenor and policies are becoming increasingly hostile, both to the citizenry to which it is beholden and from which
it claims to receive authority and to the very law from which its very existence is derived. A state, so divorced from its accountability and so blatantly willing to circumvent, or outright ignore, its lawful restriction, is one that must be challenged and thwarted in every endeavour, and which must, as an entity and in every request, be considered guilty of malicious intent until it can prove otherwise.
