The Justice Department’s Newest, Strangest Attempt to Gain Access to Suspects’ Smartphones

From Slate:

As federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies continue to lobby for access to encrypted information on the devices we use every day, they are coming up with more, and more radical, legal arguments. In the most brazen current example, the Justice Department asserts that since device “sellers” like Apple only license the software, they can be required to divulge the contents of data on the “buyers’ ” phones. 

If law enforcement wins with this logic, the consequences will be far-reaching. But one foreseeable, if almost certainly unintended, effect would be to give a huge boost to the open-source and free software movements. Before I explain why, here's some background.

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