Damn, this article pushes my buttons. I really want to rant about it. Being a libertarian, this kind of thing drives me nuts.

But I see from the comment thread that ranting is already covered, so instead I will try to provide a little context by defending the FBI (a little bit)

Part of the job of any police force is not to act in a reactive manner. You should develop leads, work confidential informants, and keep files on folks you might expect to deal with in the future. This process fits into staffing, handling large crowds, planning for needed jail and prosecution resources, and so on.

Police forces just don't sit on the corner waiting to react. If they did, they'd use a helluva lot more force than they do now. This is a good thing for everyone -- up until a point.

Likewise, in extreme circumstances, citizens should expect to be roughly handled and/or have their rights taken away from them. If you're on a public conveyance that is in danger of exploding, you might be forceably removed. Under certain unique threats, you could be strip-searched. All sorts of bad things happen -- every now and then.

This is the way it should be. When things like this occur, somebody should be taking political risk. Ticking nuclear bomb? Sure, waterboard the terrorist (please excuse arguments for torture not working for sake of argument). But that torture was a one-time, political decision made by an elected person with executive authority. That person is taking a risk. Perhaps evidence shows there was no threat. In that case, they could be removed from office.

What we're doing here that's so batshit crazy is systemitizing things that should be one-of occurrences. There are provisions for one-time extraordinary events in our system of government. But with modernization, what the government wants to do is automate all of that. No free system of government can last long under these conditions. You're killing the baby to put the fire out in the house.

Each little department, however, only sees their little piece of the action. I saw a video yesterday where a conservative congressman is now coming around to believing Apple's case[1]. He was questioning the Attorney General. What about all these side effects of what the FBI wants, he asked. Are you considering what kind of impact this case can have on the entire system?

The answer was nope, not in my wheelhouse. FBI needs something, Apple has it. They're going to need it again, so we want a system where it's easy and/or automated.

This is the case all over, from traffic tickets to civil asset forfeiture to financial reporting standards. Ideas in the past would have sounded good, Congress would have passed a law -- and 12 guys would be stuck trying to implement it. Eventually they would have given up. But now, that's no longer the case. Whatever each little silo wants, it can pay to have automated. You can bet it'll happen.

Our system is made for people to operate, not machines. Apologies for the over-the-top rhetoric, but the automation, systemization, and computerization of what used to be manual government processes is an evil far beyond anything mankind has ever seen. I don't even think most folks understand the problem, much less know what to do about it.

1. http://fortune.com/2016/03/10/apple-fbi-lindsay-graham/