By now you’ve no doubt heard something about the FBI getting a court order compelling Apple to help access the iPhone from one of the San Bernardino murders. Apple has publicly opposed the order.
There is no shortage of opinions and articles flying around on who is in the right here. If you are looking for a strange little detour into the conspiracy realm check out Robert Cringely’s take on this: The FBI v. Apple isn’t at all the way you think it is. Lots of lead up to this theory:
So if you are a President who is a lawyer and former teacher of constitutional law and you’ve come over time to see that this idea of secret backdoors into encrypted devices is not really a good idea, but one that’s going to come up again and again pushed by nearly everyone from the other political party (and even a few from your own) wouldn’t right now be the best of all possible times to kinda-sorta fight this fight all the way to the Supreme Court and lose?
Instead of the classic conspiracy theory that the government is secretly up to no good, Cringely goes with the rarely seen reverse conspiracy approach. The government is secretly trying to do something good by leveraging the current judicial dynamics.