Tough Challenge

Apple is facing a tough challenge with a court order mandating that it help open the mobile phone of a San Bernardino terrorist.  On the one hand, it doesn’t want to be seen as spying on its users anywhere in the world.  On the other, government needs a way to find out what a person was planning and with whom he might have been in contact.  There is no easy outcome for this situation.  If Apple gives in to the US on this occasion, what is there to say when the Chinese government orders the same thing in order to track activists?  The issue will wend its way through the courts and could end up at the Supreme Court’s bench.  That will determine once and for all the limits of privacy in the online world.