&gt; Should the government be able to access citizen&#x27;s digital data with a court order? And if so, how can that be enabled without compromising the general security of the device?<p>No. And that&#x27;s both impossible and a massive compromise.<p>This case helps us tackle that first question. Here the murderer&#x27;s personal phone and computer hard drives were destroyed — rendering them &quot;above&#x2F;beyond the law&quot;. Just because some data is digital doesn&#x27;t place it in some special legal realm more important than shreddable&#x2F;burnable paper or the air secret conversations were spoken into. There are fundamental limits to recoverability. If technology companies are to be forced to maintain vulnerabilities because governments see all their customers as potential terrorists, the industry is doomed.<p>The real problem here is although terrorism will never touch the average citizen anywhere near the extent of other tragedies like illness, accidents or natural disasters, the media treat it like it&#x27;s the single most important issue — making people fear for their lives is good business. I&#x27;d die before sacrificing freedom of speech every time, but the news business just seems too like racketeering. We need to fight the fear.