...and it&#x27;s an entirely reasonable position to say that they should get it, if they have a warrant. Especially if the case as cut-and-dried as the San Bernardino one.<p>The public debate on this has reached truly sad, nigh-Trumpian levels of hysteria and uninformed commentary. There is no &quot;back-door&quot; here. Encryption is not being compromised. This has very little to do with encryption at all, really: if the criminals in question were to use a strong password instead of a four-digit PIN, Apple could just shrug, say &quot;not possible in our lifetimes&quot;, and that would be the end of it. But these criminals have easily brute-forceable PIN codes, and the investigators want to brute force them.<p>This situation is about a legal fight of very narrow parameters: should it be possible for the government to compel a company to help extract its customers&#x27; &quot;secure&quot; data, via this specific, very old law. Reasonable people can disagree on this point.<p>Unfortunately, the public debate has gone <i>completely round the bend</i>, with famous people grandstanding on <i>totally irrelevant</i> things (like &quot;encryption back doors&quot;), which have no bearing on anything at all. Moreover, as it turns out, Apple has been <i>doing this for years</i> for police investigations, and the empire has not yet fallen. If you&#x27;re worried about the slippery slope, well...we&#x27;re already well downhill, and our bottoms are wet. Perspective.<p>I realize that it&#x27;s not popular amongst the tinfoil-hat set that has set up residence here, but I think that there are times when we <i>want</i> our government to be able to do things like break into a suspect&#x27;s phone. There should be safeguards (like warrants), of course, but it&#x27;s a perfectly reasonable position to say that privacy is not absolute.