Other could have been slaughtered by surprise as well.
There ought to be some common sense invoked where possibly the lives of unknown nbrs of innocents could be protected.
Who really believes that a dead mass murderer is entitled to privacy?
“The privacy of a dead murderous terrorist is probably not where Apple should have taken this stand.”
Bullshit. The feds wouldn’t look at that woman’s facebook page out of concern for her privacy. They ignored a million warnings. Then they whine that they don’t have the tools to keep us safe because of apple? Not buying.
And the feds didn’t want THAT phone opened. They wanted Apple to supply them with a tool they could use without limit. This was another FBI con game trying to expand their already disgusting levels of power and surveillance domestically.
You don't take it for a Sunday school teacher, Radix. It means nothing there. Protection for the encryption is either all, or it's nothing. That is the problem. You provide a backdoor for the good guys today, and it is guaranteed that the bad guys will have it by the end of the week.
Blackberry RIM discovered that to their dismay several years ago when they volunteered to give the Backdoor key to allow the police to access a Blackberry owned by a pedophile to get a conviction on the guarantee that it would not be released and used only that one time. When it went to trial, the judge ruled the defense was entitled to see all the evidence and how it was attained.
The police and prosecutors were ordered to release the RIM code to the defense and their IT team to assure that the evidence, thousands of kiddy porn videos and pictures, could not have been "planted" by the police on the Blackberry phone. The DA's IT guy kept a copy of the code for himself ("Never know when it might come in handy?" So did the police.) and the IT guy for the defense gave copies out to his buddies. At the end of the trial, the news media petitioned the judge, claiming the "public's right to know" and the judge agreed, and ordered the code released to the press, even though the judge had agreed it would NEVER be released, as well. So much for RIM's proprietary, "secret" secure encryption and privacy on their phones. RIM had to scramble to create a new approach to secure all of their existing and new phones at great cost to them and their customers, not to mention risk to the companies and governments who relied on their assurances of security!
If Apple had made the unlocking software available to the FBI as the Magistrate Judge ordered under the All Writs Act order, and it resulted in arrests, the SAME THING would have happened under the rules of discovery. There is no way it could not happen under our rules of jurisprudence! Ergo, the only safety lies in never creating the backdoor or any unlocking software in the first place.