Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gnewt | Hacker News Reader

Of course. The whole points of a) the bill of rights and b) the entire system of checks and balances is to make things more "difficult". This is as the framers intended, explicitly to avoid things like judicial overreach as is happening in the iPhone case.

The "inefficiency" caused by the system of checks and balances is by design... sort of like a delay after the entry of an incorrect password.

View on HN

> The "inefficiency" caused by the system of checks and balances is by design... sort of like a delay after the entry of an incorrect password.

I think that shows an important insight: The FBI believes that both the Constitution and the "PIN delay" are "making its job more difficult", because it would rather not have to follow any laws and just do whatever it wants every time, anytime.

Both rise from the same type of thinking that's happening at the FBI and most other intelligence and law enforcement bodies in the US = the laws don't apply to us.

Bingo. Every time I see a fresh gripe from the likes of the FBI, I think of how much worse it would be if we didn't have the nominal protection of the Constitution.

If it were really the case that the FBI "would rather not have to follow any laws and just do whatever it wants every time, anytime," they would have already raided Apple's headquarters and taken what they wanted at gunpoint. Obviously, they believe their position is legally justifiable.

Or it could be that the FBI expects compliance from Apple as they expect compliance from all of us _and_ they know that raiding Apple's headquarters to take what they want (what? what would they take?) at gunpoint would cause many currently compliant citizens to become less compliant.

Our system depends on many lies to keep lurching along for the benefit of the elite and anything that causes those lies to be uncovered for more and more people is best avoided, according to the status quo.

It seems obvious to me that the FBI considers their position here to be legal. All I'm saying is, if it were truly the case that they didn't care about the law at all, there are probably more direct and effective extralegal methods they could try.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com