&gt;  The Fourth Amendment guarantees your privacy, but police can break down your door and seize your financial and medical records if they have reasonable grounds to suspect you. Why should your smartphone be different?<p>This is a false dichotomy. Simply because technology creates a situation where governments can&#x27;t access a users data without the user consent.  Apple&#x27;s technology hadn&#x27;t reached this point in this case (aka end-to-end encryption), which is why we&#x27;re even having this conversation but we&#x27;ve arguably passed that point as an industry where that will be the future legal environment.<p>It&#x27;s entirely plausible Apple could create an iPhone that they can&#x27;t unlock, or iMessages they can&#x27;t read. So then it&#x27;s no longer about coercing middlemen but the US gov vs user consent. Outside of self-incrimination this changes the legal question to be about unlocking every persons medical&#x2F;financial records, not about unlocking a single persons.<p>The only path the government has is to  coerce Apple into making backdoors or purposefully weakening their encryption for <i>all</i> devices which affects every Americans fourth amendment rights - as well as public saftey.<p>Therefore this is not just about one person in a criminal trial - since a backdoor can never be made only for a single court case, it will by nature unlock the phones to any party who can create or get access to the backdoor.<p>So the only legal path for the government is to either coerce suspects into self-incrimination by forcing them to unlock their phones or prevent Apple&#x2F;Google&#x2F;etc customers from being able to meaningfully lock their phones in the first place. The problem with the latter is that criminals&#x2F;terrorists won&#x27;t be forced to use the backdoored Apple&#x2F;Google&#x2F;etc technology but can use open-source versions with encryption to side-step law enforcement&#x27;s efforts - making it ultimately ineffective as a legal strategy.