[hahainternet]

> Brining up the most horrible of crimes to justify a particular argument for increasing the powers of law enforcement is an obvious attempt to appeal to emotion, rather than to experience.

No it's actually an appeal to both. The increase in powers here if any exists whatsoever is minimal. I'm advocating Apple comply with them.

> If your argument is any good, it will be just as good when talking about why the police should be able to search your phone for evidence of tax evasion as it is for talking about why the police should be able to search your phone for evidence of child rape and terrorism.

If they can search your home for it, they should be permitted to search your phone for it. Both should have the exact same expectation of privacy and the exact same judicial oversight.

> Otherwise, we go to a place where we say, "Well, the shouldn't summarily execute people who steal cigars from convenience stores, but when it comes to terrorists, we shouldn't let laws get in the way of their need to do what's expedient."

There is no evidence that there is any legal protection for Apple here and strong evidence that indeed the FBI can compel them. Nobody is advocating breaking the law or even going around it.

[braythwayt]

  > If they can search your home for it, they should be permitted to search
  > your phone for it. Both should have the exact same expectation of
  > privacy and the exact same judicial oversight.

They are permitted to search your phone for it. The problem here is that they are saying:

We wish to search this home, as is our legal right. The home contains a safe that we claim we cannot open, and we wish to compel the manufacturer of the safe to assist us to search the safe. The manufacturer does not wish to do so, but we insist that they be forced to do so by threat of imprisonment.

Furthermore, we wish to do so by compelling the manufacturer of the safe to create technologies that could open all safes, without the knowledge of the safe owners. We claim we only want to open this one safe, but we have this long track record of opening as many safes as we can, using secret courts and hearings to obtain the right to search those safes without the owners of those safes having the opportunity to argue against us, which is a different level of judicial oversight than being applied to searching this one house.

[EdHominem]

> There is no evidence that there is any legal protection ...

Even if that were true, it would be irrelevant. We aren't stuck with our laws. If they're abusive or useless they need to be changed.

> If they can search your home for it, they should be permitted to search ...

Sure, I can see that you think that. But making false equivalences isn't a good argument even if it tends to be the usual limit of political discourse. Our servants are "permitted", with the right suspicion and warrants, to search almost anything (in the name of the people). Yes.

But this isn't a case of permission, it's about capability. They're incapable. You're implying that the law not only permits some searches, but necessarily compels unlimited help in making those searches possible?

That's a huge stretch. Especially when that help involves uttering falsehoods.