this position is liable to damage privacy.
What we have in this case is a convicted murderer (well, he would have been if he were alive) and a judge with a warrant, on US territory, in a very open and public procedure. At this point, I see no more expectation of privacy than I would expect in performing a search of physical premises under the same circumstances.
Either Apple is either able to do this or not. If they are not, fine. If they are able to, and it is a generalized weakness in their security, applicable under different circumstances, then they should patch the vulnerability. If, as this article implies, they are able to do it and to do so without putting other users at risk, they should comply with what seems to be an entirely reasonable judicial request.
Apple can choose to fight it. But in doing so, it is, in my opinion, providing ammunition to those politicians who are scare-mongering and requesting encryption backdoors willy-nilly. If a company can't be compelled to cooperate, if able to, under current laws for something as clearly justified as this, then the pressure will grow to limit encryption in general. A backdoor-based approach is much more dangerous than a warrant-based compulsion to collaborate with law enforcement.
i.e. Apple can choose to make its products' unhackable and should be allowed to. But it should not be allowed to ignore the law.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
