Anybody who refuses to honor a warrant can sit in jail forever if he doesn’t cough up the password.
So...
I think it’s the encrypted stuff that Apple, Google, etc have on the phone that they want to keep secret- and the government wants to know.
If their customers ever found out the how closely Apple, Google, etc. were spying on them they’d sue.
Nonsense. What if you forget your password? You stay in jail for the rest of your life?
Also, wouldn't it raise Fifth Amendment issues?
If the government wants to put you in prison for something, let them acquire their evidence without your assistance, just like it always has been.
Mathematics is mathematics. That it might pose obstacles to totalitarians is just a hard motherf-----g fact of life...
Apple has stated categorically they are not spying on their customers. . . and the data stored with them is encrypted by the users to 256 bit AES encryption before Apple ever gets it. If you don't understand what that means, learn. Just understand that if you use a 16 character password, it will be entangled with your device's 128 character Universal Unique ID to make the 140 character key for the encryption, which would require 4.92 X 1035 YEARS, to try all possible combinations of keys to decrypt your data assuming a supercomputer capable of trying 100,000 keys per second on your data in an attempt to find one that works. That's 49.2 Undecillion years.
Since the theoretical half-life of protons is considerably less than that, the Universe would have long since devolved to primordial soup before they got more than half way done, and I think the importance of your data would be pretty much moot by then and you wouldn't care any more anyway.
Did I mention that Apple doesn't have your key? How good are you at withstanding waterboarding?
Three hots and a cot. . . and free health care? What's not to like?