I hope they have that much trouble if they ever want to get into my phone.
Therein lies the problem.
We will gradually lose our liberties and our privacy in favor of security and safety and then the terrorist will have won. Because the terrorists will have forced us all to give up what has made this country great — our liberty and freedom.
There’s nothing on your phone they want. Calm down and think objectively.
Any government can run amok, and everybody has to keep an eye on that. The problem is not the legal capacity to get the information, but what they’re going to do with it. There are many terrorist attacks that have been thwarted because of information, and others that could have been (I think the most recent French attack is among them) if there had been more access to information.
Potentially, this could be used to attack anybody if suddenly the government decides they don’t like them - for example, if Islamists get into power in the US, which in my opinion is not at all unlikely, especially if either Trump or Sanders gets elected.
But at the moment, the FBI is on our side, and I think it’s a little alarming that they can’t get into this. One of the problems is that the FBI is way behind in computer resources, including both hardware and trained people. I gave a class once to an FBI office, years and years ago, and not only did they have outdated equipment but they had a ton of civilian employees who could barely spell the word “computer” and were afraid of it, and a lot of agents who somehow seemed to think it wasn’t going to impact their lives and maybe somebody else would handle it anyway. You know, the Hillary Clinton attitude...