Apple contends such software would disable encryption for any number of its phones. Police departments in New York and Michigan have more than one hundred cell phones they would like Apple to decrypt.
But the precedent of the FBI case doesn't stop with US law enforcement. Countries like China, with few privacy safeguards, would then require Apple's help in their controlling dissidents' communications.
The issue isn't new. A study (http://goo.gl/l1iQsK) by a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology artificial intelligence experts shows mandatory law enforcement data access has been an issue for 20 years.
Previous attempts for access by intelligence agencies found their own systems vulnerable (as whistleblower Edward Snowden proved).
The conclusion, then, of the government was that encryption technology was necessary for enhancing the technologies of commerce while providing not too burdensome a challenge to investigative agency requirements.
Admiral James A Winnefeld, vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is on record in support of maintaining robust encryption in communication systems.
Ultimately the matter needs resolution, not by unelected judges but by the representatives in the legislature.
Predicting an attack by an individual or small group is nearly impossible. The response of the law enforcement and intelligence agencies to such an attack is quite predictable.
In each instance of what might be viewed by the public as an intelligence failure (even if it's not), there comes a demand for increased powers of surveillance. Frequently, too, the public - fearful for its security, however remote the danger - is momentarily eager to comply.
The US constitution does not explicitly spell out a right to privacy. Rather the Supreme Court found it there in Griswold v Connecticut (1965), divining a privacy from the several rights - the First, Third, Fourth and Ninth amendments.
In what seems quaint today, the decision, legalising contraceptives dispensed by Planned Parenthood to married couples, applied only there.
Privacy of the individual is relatively new and fragile, as the abortion fight in the US illustrates. While privacy has come a long way from Griswold, the attacks on Planned Parenthood show how the privacy right, even to the most intimate of bodily functions, ebbs and flows.
If the government can find it necessary to regulate what goes on in the bedroom, how much more interest can it find in what goes on in the study of a person's mind and communications?
Now that the court has found privacy as a right fundamental to democracy, we need to think long and hard and debate vigorously before consenting to give it away.
-Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years of his life comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.
