Cooking Up Excuses For Non Cooperation

TIM COOK, CEO OF APPLE COMPUTER, is a person of the highest integrity who intends to donate his entire fortune to charity, and serves the cause of tolerance by openly embracing his homosexuality. The fly in the ointment is his current refusal to cooperate with the feds by providing the FBI with the key to a single cell phone, a cell phone of great importance, the one used by a team of mass murderers. One can argue that his position is justified on the grounds that private property must be protected from government intrusion, which he does, and that the unlocking of even a single cell phone begins a slippery slope down which the country might slide towards complete government surveillance of everyone's phone activity. Cook uses both arguments, the legal, and the technical-theoretical. Neither, however, is valid. Any decent hacker will tell you that Apple could very well provide the fibbies with the key to unlock a single phone of interest, then throw the key away, without endangering the rest of us, and our smart phone privacy. Any legal expert will tell you that, in reality, the slippery slope argument is pointless, pure speculation. Not only that, but Bill gates himself has come out in favor of full and complete cooperation by Apple. it is worth noting, however, that is has now been revealed that the feds now have a list of twelve other cell phones they would like to have unlocked, and that apple has cooperated under similar circumstances no less than seventy times previously. Slippery slopes do not always result in disastrous slippage, though they admittedly do sometimes, and, after all, if the information retrieved on the phone in question results in useful information being gleaned, so much the better. The rest of us can still go about our electronic business, fully encrypted, texting, sexting, and emailing at will. The American government seems usually to be on the wrong side, but not this time.