Just imagine...you are in a cartel or you are Johnny Jihad...openly plan anything, trade pictures, plans, live intel...and do it anywhere in the world. Busted? You got a 50 Billion dollar a year AMERICAN company that’s got your back. Forget the tactical advantage. Picture the recruiting value.
Thanks Apple.
Imagine you are just a good ole Christian Conservative in a country that has shifted heavily socialist. Perhaps a liberal who doesn't like you pulls a few strings and has you arrested for a trumped up charge (traffic stop and they claim you resisted arrest). Now they have the code to unlock your phone. You happen to mention to a buddy that you have put up a stash of guns and ammo in the woods in case a SHTF scenario occurs in the future. Boom you are arrest for terrorism.
I see my version as more likely to occur.
The recruiting value? What the hell is that? You sound like the Democrats who say that every statement out of Donald Trump's mouth is a recruiting tool. The contents of the phone memory are encrypted. The communication between phones is not. Apparently, we need to have unencryted communication and unencrypted memory just in case some jihadists decide to do what they think their religion tells them to do. We already get felt up at the airport, there are cameras everywhere, and the NSA has all the metadata. Now, if you own an Apple device, you can't have any privacy so that one terrorism event every 3 or 4 years that kills a couple dozen people can be prevented, even though the event already happens by the time they get around to wanting the information.
I don't want to open my door every time some bureaucrat wants to make sure there is no jihad going on at my house. There already isn't. So every embarrassing thing that I text to my doctor, or any communication with my spouse, or all my banking transactions are fair game just to be sure no laws are being broken. But we aren't talking about laws, we are talking about jihad, which I guess is something that makes it so legal protections are an obstacle to preventing it.