Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone

Let's go off the deep end, shall we, and speculate? Consciousness (the process that manages your evidence) is already encrypted. It's encrypted by quantum events occurring in the brain. The going conjecture is that microtubules in brain cells provide a latticework to maintain and force collapse of quantum states which somehow drive neuron activity. Regardless if you believe that or not, it is now known that brains are storing information in DNA and that DNA processes appear to be governed by quantum events. It's a reasonably palatable conjecture which may be testable in the next few years, and it's speculation for the hell of it here anyway.

Having essentially hardware equipped encryption, you brain ends up being completely unique and probably uncopyable in total from a quantum level process, given it lives half here and, ahem, half there. Any connection to it by a non-quantum devices in reality, especially high speed ones, are probably a bad idea as it increases the exposure surface area beyond what nature has likely already secured. Given your brain is reprogrammable, it's probably not a good idea to hook up weird shit to it until we know more about how the universe and it work. That includes any shit a government asks you to hook up to yourself now and again when you pass through its borders.

The 5th amendment being out of date is the least of our problems. Our government in the US, in its valiant attempt to protect us, has somehow decided it needs to keep increasing the efficiency of protection in response to what appear to be escalating abilities with the bad guys. The problem is, of course, is that eliminating all suffering is completely impossible, and that the idea of what is a decent amount of suffering to endure is constantly shifting as it's being squabbled over by people infected with angry cooperative memes...memes which have forgotten that this country was founded on freedom to do whatever you wanted, when you wanted to do it, as long as you weren't shitting on your neighbor when you did it.

Frankly, I'm more concerned about cloud services nowadays than phones. Seems as if a phone is just a viewport to the cloud and with so many services and apps accessing my phone's data (seems like every day another apps asks for more data) that the exposure area of my phone's cloud footprint is probably easier to hack than the phone itself.

> If Alice punches Bob in the face, then is hit by a bus and dies, we don't go searching through all of Alice's stuff just in case there might have been someone else involved with the Bob-punching incident, right?

Wrong. If Alice announces that she's looking for people to attack then of course we go looking so see why she's doing that and if other are others involved.

This wasn't some random emotional attack like a bar fight. Stop setting up nonsensical strawmen for your arguments, argue the hard cases not the easy ones.

If your argument/objection can survive the hard cases then you have something, arguing the easy cases is meaningless.

Did it actually write zeros to the flash memory or did it leave the data sitting around somewhere?

A reasonable cost may still be $150 to $200 per hour. Engineering time charged to a third party is never cheap.

In response to your (first?) edit:

> The woman in the couple declared it right before the shooting[0].

I'm not questioning that she declared allegiance. I'm asking if she was in private contact with anyone. If you were responding to that, can you show me where that is in the NYT article you linked? I don't see it.

> Do you want a notarized letter from the deceased?

Let's try to keep this civil, please.

> Do you really view this as a government overreach or are you just trolling?

I actually believe the things I am saying. I am not saying them to anger or upset you or anyone else. Please do not let the fact that we disagree about the scope of the 4th Amendment cause you emotional suffering.

I am not ready to declare it overreach, because I do not know all of the evidence yet. This is why I have been saying things like "Do we have reason to believe that there is evidence of any pending crimes or any old unsolved crimes on the phone?" and "did they say or hint that they had been in contact with that group" and "I have not followed the news on this shooting, so I would not be shocked if the answer were 'yes, there is some evidence of a conspiracy'."

If there is no such evidence, I do think it is overreach, but my opinions on policy are not fixed in stone, and I sometimes change my mind about them when presented with new arguments, ideas, or philosophies.

> Under what circumstances, if any, would you see as justified a search of someone's email? phone? house?

I doubt anyone has a complete enumeration of all circumstances under which they feel a search is justified. I would feel torn if there was lousy circumstantial evidence that the phone would solve or prevent crimes, I would be in support of a warrant if there was strong evidence, and I am opposed to a warrant with no evidence. One thing I would call strong evidence is a shooter having announced that he or she was part of a terrorist cell in the US.

I will no longer reading or responding to your edits that are "edited to reply". If you want to discuss with me further, please reply to reply by using the "reply" button. I will not be editing any of my posts to "edit to reply".