The author's rather feeble effort to trivialize the First Amendment issues disgusted me... until it dawned on me that the Kieren McCarthy probably wrote that piece under duress from the US Department of Justice.
OK, so maybe not... but if Apple can be compelled to spend 10 man months or more using highly skilled individuals to create software (which, Kieren, is speech, as a matter of law, regardless of what you think), why can't some hack be compelled to spend 10 minutes or so banging out that article, and then attaching the by-line?
The cops are full of BS. Their argument is no different from arguing that cars should be limited to the speed of a galloping horse, so the cops can catch them. And it ignores the reality that unbreakable encoding has existed since the beginning of time: what does "Tora! Tora! Tora!" mean, anyway? (coding != ciphering, of course).
Yes, we understand it's convenient for cops to be able to mine all sorts of things for evidence, and we understand they've been able to achieve great things with the fruits of those mining expeditions, but fundamentally the cops (and Kieren) are arguing that everyone should be implanted with a GPS tracker / camera / recorder, because it would be jolly useful to have that evidence.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
