These are interesting questions. The question is if those locks can be opened somehow if there is a lawful court order specifying what they're after (US Constitution, Bill of Rights, Amendment IV). The pinnacle of lock technology in 1776 was a padlock with a key. Anything could be torn or pried open, and that's exactly what the Founding Fathers wanted if there were legal authority to do so, even if the owner of the thing didn't want it to be done.
As much as we now may want it, it doesn't seem that our national framework provides for complete, absolute, unbreakable privacy in every possible circumstance. In this way, President Obama (you know, the Constitutional schola ... I mean "idiot") seems correct.
U.S. citizens who want to eliminate guns from society are stuck with the Second Amendment, and people who want to create utterly inaccessible informational repositories may be stuck with the Fourth. We'll have to wait and see what the SCOTUS says on the matter.
Um, no.
In 1776 people had already figured out how to burn papers containing secrets they didn't want known.
Specifically regarding retrievable encryptions, there were a number of secret-key cipher mechanisms available even then, amongst those who knew (and we know that Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Jay, and Thomas Jefferson were all well versed in the mechanisms and uses of a number of cipher mechanisms). Freemasonry had been practicing various forms of cryptography for many many years by the time the Constitution was written, and it is believed that a large number of the authors of that document (and its Bill of Rights amendments collection) were if not Freemason members at least familiar with its routines and some of its secrets. Breaking secret-key cipher mechanisms then was seen as impossible just like breaking AES-256 is today; if you needed to decrypt one of these messages you needed to find the cipher key, just like with AES-256 today.
I don't think that it is correct to state that the fourth amendment was written in a time or by people who could not conceive of secrets being irretrievably hidden. One should also note that those same folks also wrote the fifth amendment which among other things guarantees that someone will not be compelled to testify against themselves, which the SCOTUS has interpreted as extending to non-physical passcodes (there is a small gray area where SCOTUS has not yet ruled and different districts have ruled differently specifically for computer passwords as opposed to physical lock combinations, but that inconsistency has not made it up to the SCOTUS yet).
Other relevant SCOTUS caselaw would be Griswold v. Connecticut (1964), where the SCOTUS laid out an implied right to privacy emanating from the combination of the Fifth (self incrimination and due process clauses), Ninth, and Fourteenth amendments itself (seven judges concurred that this right to privacy existed; they separately based the right on language in each of those amendments, only two of which based on the non-BoR 14th amendment, so at least five judges agreed it was implied by the original Constitution+Bill of Rights language). You may know this as the ruling which made it legal to purchase contraceptives in the United States and a significant precursor to Roe v Wade. You'll still hear conservatives decrying the "right to privacy" as made-up, but that is just old anti-abortion propaganda.
Specific to the Apple case as opposed to theoretical backdoor legislation, the first amendment is in Apple's favor (writing code, even a single line of code, is considered speech and can not be compelled) as is the due process clause of the fifth amendment. The All Writs Act is not a part of the Constitution and so can not be used to supercede Constitutional rights, but if those Constitutional rights do not apply then Apple also has several strong arguments against the AWA being applicable in this case (on pretty much every test - Apple is removed from the crime, the request from the FBI is not reasonable as it is significantly larger in scope than any asked of any company previously, and the matter has not been wholly ignored by Congress as they preliminarily considered CALEA II which would have given the FBI what it is requesting here but instead did not push that through ... the last is shaky as prior case law says that Congress needs to specifically pass a law and that failure of a law to pass (much less be fully considered) is not an indication that what the law says should not be allowed).
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That's because you start off as seeing everyone who uses your software as good. If you were the POTUS you'd have to start off by seeing everyone as bad and a threat, because it only takes one bad person to cause unimaginable damage and you do not know who they are. So if you have reason to think that someone is that one bad person you NEED some way to check and see if they are.
We do not have doors on our houses or our cars that have no locks. Locks allow controlled entry. If people will just chill and put down the hatred for a moment, they would see that in our country, this constitution everyone seems so quick to talk about REQUIRES that the locks be opened for the right reasons even if the owner does not want them to be. That is all the President is saying and all he is asking you to do is to think.
This is just the 21st century version of that. So those here arguing for their constitutional right to total complete privacy, You have never had that right and you are not going to be getting it in the future. The Repubs and the Dems don't agree on much anymore but everyone in the Washington government agrees about that.
First off, not every crime "needs" to be solved. That was explicitly stated by several of the founding fathers, that the system of justice was intended to allow some crimes to go unpunished in favor of not impinging on personal rights.
Second, physical keys must be provided, but the fifth amendment forbids requiring combinations for combination locks to be handed over. There is some discussion about if a computer password follows the combination model since it is something without intrinsic testimonial value which the user knows rather than possesses, but there are cases making their way to SCOTUS soon to resolve that discrepancy.
Finally, yes, warrants are to be given. The issue with a back door (not the Apple case specifically; there are many more pertinent legal arguments against that; speaking here to the expected Clipper Chip II legislation) is that from a practical perspective it is impossible for the US Government to hold that key tightly enough, and that releasing the key even accidentally would lead to the loss of the right of privacy (Griswold, 1964) for countless Americans (as well as being very very bad for everyone else around the world too). This would be a bit of a stretch as a SCOTUS argument, but as an argument in the Congressional hearings it may be made very compelling.