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Comment by y0y | Hacker News Reader

I've seen a lot of doom and gloom about the current state of the US government all around the internet, but I have to say that this kind of thing helps me remain optimistic. A judge is free to make his or her decision without fear of coercion or some fanciful Tom Clancy-esque story unfolding as some people seem to believe things to work. The system may be flawed, but it's not broken yet.

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I would feel a lot more confident about the US's overall state of corruption if the defendant in this case weren't the largest capitalized company in the world.

Would this case have come to the same result (which is likely to be appealed) if it was say UnluckySmallCo. instead of Apple that was on the receiving end of the government's pressure?

If UnluckySmallCo. had created a phone that was used by defendants in nine separate cases, they probably would be big enough to handle it.

Let's look at it from a different angle: What if you were a GNU/Linux distro maintainer and nine defendants had used your OS instead of Windows? Could you be forced to help the FBI?

Or you maintained an open source crypto library? Yeah, that might be tougher.

But if it was an open source crypto library, the feds could just fork it and leave you alone...

the fact that the government is creating so many cases, hoping one sticks, isn't a good sign to me. lavabit didn't fare so well.

I thought the defendant in this case was a drug dealer.

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