I got interested in this issue when, six days ago on Tuesday March 1, I heard a long long interview of Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Bloomberg News by Emily Chang, followed by a long and snarky discussion by talking heads. Indicating (to me at least) that conservative radio media are quite interested in this issue as a political football and as a weapon against Democrats. I was blown away at how beautifully Ms. Lynch answered, calm, clear, concise, totally in command, in the face of an aggressive and smart interviewer. She would make a great Supreme.
But I digress.
It is generally accepted practice that if there is reasonable cause to suspect that your property contains evidence of a crime that is being investigated, that the courts can issue a search warrant that entitles investigators to search your property, be it house, or papers, or computer, or safe deposit, etcetera etcera.
To me the issue is 100 per cent clear cut. Should devices made by Apple Corporation enjoy a specially privileged immunity from search warrants ? And I think the correct answer is clearly a huge resounding NO.
However, in the real world, if Apple were to provide the FBI with a backdoor key that would open any locked iPhone, the FBI could then search any locked iPhone without obtaining a search warrant and maybe the master key might be stolen by hackers, assuming the FBI might be unethical or incompetent, which hopefully is extremely unlikely, but not totally impossible.