Earlier quoted context omitted.
This recent debate has quite literally centered on his administration using the San Bernardino shootings as leverage to force Apple to break iPhone's encryption. It's the main reason this whole discussion has the profile level it does.
He's asking to strike a balance in a court case. The tone, the actions, are so incredibly measured . Even though I disagree with them. And let's face it, iPhone encryption is weak encryption, with a single point of failure, the Apple signing key. In comparison, six weeks after 9/11 we got the entire PATRIOT act rammed through, and the current NSA domestic panopticon put into place illegally and in secret. And the adm…
So what? The underlying debate is whether or not the DOJ should be allowed to require phone manufacturers to guarantee they can decrypt phone data when served with a warrant.
You can rally for Apple to make a more secure phone all you want. That is a separate issue. It doesn't change the fact that the DOJ is willing to do everything it can to get access to all phones through the courts or Congress. They don't care how it happens, they just want it.
It's not about one phone, it's not even just about the phones the DOJ currently has waiting to be decrypted. It's about every phone in the world. The DOJ knows this, but they can't say that because it is part of their position to argue that this is only about one phone.
This is politics. These are lawyers. They will say anything that they think will convince a judge, Congress or the American people to win them to what they believe is the correct side. That's how our system works.
They're not conspiring to do evil. They just don't have all the facts. And even if they are conspiring to do evil, our course should be the same. We should educate each other about how encryption works, and how legislation requiring backdoors would actually make us all less safe on balance than having no backdoors at all.