While I appreciate Tim Cook taking a principled stand on this issue, I can't help but laugh at a liberal activist like Tim Cook seeing the very same big government he supports getting involved in every other aspect of our lives and businesses coming back to bite him in the ass. Sorry, Tim, but you can't have it both ways. You don't get to pick and choose what type of big government you get. You let it grow, and it will keep on growing. You give it power and it will take more and more.
So yeah, Tim, stick it to the man. I'm right there with you. But don't forget you're the one who bought the man his suit and sicced him on your enemies first.
The only way you stop government from these sorts of overreaching policies is to stop worshiping government as the solution to all our problems. We should rely on our individual liberties to protect us. Freedom of speech to challenge these muslim lunatics in a war of ideas before any of their children decide to act on their religious duty to kill nonbelievers. Freedom of religion so islamic reformers don't feel threatened by the west and throw in with the fundamentalists as their only choice. Freedom of the press to challenge government policies and show the world that there's a better way than the sort of propaganda most of the world must listen to. Freedom to assemble peaceably, so that violence is used only as a last resort. Freedom to bear arms so there's no more gun-free zones for bad guys to specifically target as an easy place to kill a lot of people.
Every terrorist attack that's been stopped has been stopped by regular people, acting swiftly when they saw a threat. Take a look at Flight 93, at the shoe bomber, at the Times Square bomber. By the time you're really in trouble, the government is not there to help you. You'd better act quick, in the interest of your own safety and the safety of others. Paris has some of the toughest anti-gun laws in the world, and look what happened. It's illegal to carry a gun in a county building in San Bernardino, and look what happened. The FBI is not going to be there on site the next time a muslim terrorist shoots up a building or walks into a crowd with a bomb in a backpack. The FBI is going to come in and investigate the carnage after the fact, and then push for more draconian laws that will make it harder for you to protect yourself from the very real threats you face. It might mean more anti-self-defense laws like Obama's "executive actions" in violation of the principle of separation of powers. It might mean more surveillance programs that make you vulnerable to hackers, whether it's a backdoor in your device or a massive government database that can never be truly secured. The government cannot guarantee that their own backdoors will never be used by other parties, but even if they could, all it takes is one black hat Snowden-type or a foreign government to gain access to information and leak it. You know how I know there's no aliens in Area 51? Because the government can never keep a secret about anything. They still want you to trust them to keep a backdoor secret, or keep secret everything they've learned from spying on you without a warrant.
The government can't and won't save you. Whether it's poor healthcare or terrorists, if you give the government power over you it will only make things worse and violate the rest of your liberties. They'll try to dictate your religious beliefs or they'll destroy your right to privacy. Then, like every government before it in the history of mankind, yours will become more and more corrupt, more and more oppressive, until there's a bloody civil war, revolution, or another government smells weakness and invades.
So Tim, while you're meeting with all your lawyers, to contend with a government headed by liberals like yourself, perhaps you should reconsider your support for such a government to begin with. The rest of you, at least in the States, consider carefully who you vote for in November. When it comes to making government big and making you grovel before it, I have a hard time differentiating the Democrats from most of the Republicans. Trump is no different from Clinton or Sanders in wanting a huge nanny state that will "protect" you with oppressive laws and endless spending of your pay check and your grandchildren's future. The only major party candidate left in the race who has made any effort to stop these mass warrantless surveillance programs and backdoor schemes is Ted Cruz, though he has not been the vocal critic of big government that Rand Paul has been.
If you can't stomach Ted Cruz, or he doesn't win the nomination of his party, then vote for the Libertarian Party candidate, whoever that ends up being. I for one will not vote for another candidate ever again who wants to expand government, however well-meaning they may be, or how important the issue is to me personally. I know that government cannot solve every issue, or even most issues well. You would think that a "community organizer" like our current president would recognize the necessity to deal with issues within a community, instead of in Washington.
The government has gotten out of hand. It's expanded so dramatically, and the executive branch has seized so much power, we need a reset. We need common sense approaches to the top priority issues we have, instead of thousands of terrible and oppressive approaches to issues that are better handled locally or by individuals.
