Apple was defending freedom and privacy, two key principles in our society that the terrorists are trying to destroy. A calm, reasonable and proportionate approach towards terrorists is the best way to fight them. A reactionary and authoritarian approach that tramples over civil liberties merely rewards them with exactly what they wanted, and arguably encourages further similar incidents in the future.
Undermining encryption for everyone is a much worse idea than protecting it even if it means that sometimes bad people can use it too. Bad people still drink water, eat food and breathe air - that doesn't mean we should make all water toxic, all food poisonous and all air unbreathable, just to stop them. 'Cutting your nose off to spite your face' is a phrase that I think sums up the argument against maintaining strong encryption fairly well.
Yea, did you hear about the 'March Against Fear' rally that got canceled in Brussels? Mission accomplished terrorists!
The thing is, most terrorists who can pull off anything major are probably also organized enough to be using independent encryption. So long as they don't pick one that's already compromised (Tor, Signal, etc.) it isn't like they'll be relying on iOS encryption anyway.
The media/gov't like to keep painting the situation as if these are just poor, stupid people doing these attacks. And, some of the 'events' the gov't is triggering are, as they find unstable people to provoke and supply. But, many of the real terrorists have been doctors, lawyer, engineers, etc. Not idiots. They are either A) committed to radical Islamic ideas (something our politicians just can't seem to face... they even recently edited out part of what the French President said for the US media) or, B) very politically ticked off at the US/West.
Terrorism is just the excuse to accomplish a higher mission. How will the government maintain the game they are currently playing if the citizens start realizing what is going on? Blackmail usually works. That's what this is about.
The way the FBI tried to accomplish this was wrong but it's end goal was not.
Depends on what the end goal was... see above.
The FBI is betting on the fact that the terrorists were not very smart and left something that was a mistake and is not at all obvious. Like one deleted text message that went to the wrong device, etc. I also think the chances are low, but based on all the other ways the government wastes millions of dollars, this way does not seem so bad.
See above, and what others have said about all the data they already had from the activities of the phone.
And, just because they waste millions (millions, try billions and trillions! Heck, the defense dept claims they can't account for several hundred BILLION because, you know, they still have Cobol systems.... nice excuse), why let them get away with wasting more?
But the calm, reasonable and proportionate approach is to start much earlier and keep idiots from doing stupid things. Clearly someone with a bomb strapped to himself is an idiot and getting to him much earlier and removing the motivation for doing something stupid would be much better and safer. Like building bridges instead of declaring that 1.6 billion muslims hate the USA.
I'm for calm and reasonable, but I don't think you quite understand what's going on. On a political level, we've been tearing bridges down for decades, with no end in sight. And, no, most of these people aren't idiots. They are, very determined and often, very ticked off. Until some of our leaders start to recognize this (or, they probably do, but it isn't the point), they aren't going to make much headway 'building bridges.'
To the political terrorists, 'building a bridge' might be to stop toppling their governments and killing their people for pipelines. To the radical Islamist, we have to end the war, and submit. Build a bridge, LOL.
It's more like Apple wasn't stupid enough to go along with it. If it had been purely up to the regular public, the FBI would have just don't whatever they wanted and not cared about how anyone else felt about it.
Yea, that's a fair point. If the general public were more informed and paying attention, the gov't and country wouldn't be in this mess in the first place. Back to the Kardashians people... nothing to see here!