So according to their own legal presentation, Apple hardly mentions security at all in their advertising. I guess this means their customers aren’t paying much attention to it. So it wouldn’t hurt Apple much to cooperate with the FBI and crack the phone. It wouldn’t do any damage to their brand or business model, to speak of.

>So it wouldn’t hurt Apple much to cooperate with the FBI and crack the phone. It wouldn’t do any damage to their brand or business model, to speak of.

To understand Apple’s position, you have to remember the context. OK, they have raised control-freakery to an art form. But there is sanity in their method.

iPhones are expensive (that, you need to understand, is “business model”) and it’s in Apple’s interest to make them desirable (that, you need to understand, is called “branding”). But … things that are expensive, desirable, and portable are targets for thieves. And, surprise–not!–several years ago there were numerous reports of “iPhone snatch” rings.

This hurts Apple customers in two ways. They lose their valuable property, and they lose even-more-valuable information. It is therefore critical to Apple’s business strategy to reduce theft, and reduce its consequences when it happens.

OK, so first they encrypt the phone. Thieves have a harder time using it, right, and that reduces the incentive to steal. But, thieves being thieves, they hire hackers to jailbreak the phones….

Second, Apple works harder to block jailbreaking: if they can be perfectly successful, that reduces iPhone value to zero–for thieves, at least. They are (right now) very close to successful, and iPhone thefts have dropped by an order of magnitude from their height.

Now, device-jailbreaking isn’t inherently a moral offense, or even a legal offence. For over a hundred years, “tinkering” has been considered a laudable national pastime, and the knowledge gained has started innumerable young people on the road to engineering careers. Most jailbreakers aren’t criminals and don’t want to be: they’re insatiably curious.

But from Apple’s point of view, jailbreaking an iPhone is a necessary step in the iPhone-theft process. All iPhone thieves have to be jailbreakers, even if the converse is not true. So preventing jailbreaking _is_ preventing iPhone theft. That makes iPhones more valuable to honest customers, and — making your products more valuable to your customers is the _only_ honest business model.

And all these changes the Fibbies want, are aimed at making jailbreaking easier. Which reduces security for every iPhone customer in the world, and is a direct positive contribution to every would-be iPhone thief in the world.

So it’s not a choice between helping terrorists or helping a company brand. The terrorists are pushing up the daisies. They have gone to meet their maker. They are ex-terrorists.

It’s a choice between helping phone thieves, and protecting honest customers.

Now, some people apparently think Apple has the ability, right, and obligation to determine which of their customers are “honest” and deserve protection, and which of their customers are “rotten” and deserve to have their iPhones stolen by people with allegedly-good motives. Without discussing right or obligation, I merely suggest, as a programmer, that I believe they have not that ability.

I have to wonder when did the US government give itself the legal right to lie to the courts, the public, and anyone listening, with total impunity. Are they now completely above the law? Everything they have stated in this case, is pure bullshit and there is just no way they can claim they just mis-spoke themselves, or misunderstood the law. They are literally fabricating falsehoods in an attempt to trick the courts into giving them more power. It is truly disgusting to watch. Even more so knowing there is no legal repercussion or reason for them to stop lying.