Apple should not be coerced into hacking into the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, and we must get to a point as a society where law enforcement does not even make such a request. Mobile devices are not mere repositories for addresses, appointments, and email. As many people use them now, they are digital records of our thoughts, hopes, passions, and often our most personal secrets.
The metaphor of a safe simply does not work for the way many Americans currently use their phones. An increasingly accurate metaphor for a smart phone, is the human mind – smart phones contain a digital snapshot of key pieces of data that we previously held almost exclusively in our minds. We should no more think of hacking into peoples’ smart phones than we should think of administering psychotropic drugs against someone’s will to coerce testimony. It should be unthinkable in a free society.
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