For sure! I definitely believe people can make up their own minds, and hopefully most will. All I'm saying is we all don't have time to learn about every scie

For sure! I definitely believe people can make up their own minds, and hopefully most will. All I'm saying is we all don't have time to learn about every scientific advance and the surrounding laws and implications. We entrust a lot of that to others. And sometimes, through lack of knowledge, we can be swung by fear. My fear, since I don't know much about how law enforcement operates, is that law enforcement already feels disrespected by the public, and they will blame technologists for failing to catch terrorists instead of doing the best they can at their jobs. The rise in portable social media has amplified situations where they make mistakes. They need to quickly improve the quality of their service in order to maintain our trust. On top of that, if Apple builds a more secure device, they may soon find that they no longer have access to as much information as they had for the last 5 years. Like any boss, the President is supposedly the best suited and most informed. In this case he is the most informed on security issues balanced with civil liberties, and so he holds some convincing power over those who may not be as informed as he is, which includes all levels of the DOJ and the general public. It'd be nice if he knew a few more details about encryption and could either share those facts with the world so we can all understand a little bit more about the future, or at least stop acting like there is something tech companies can do to help the government catch terrorists who use encryption to hide their communications. On an ad hoc basis there may be something tech companies could do with the NSA, like having a special forces tech group, but forcing all encryption software to do key escrow just isn't feasible when you consider open source and free software. Obama's rhetoric sounds like he wants some permanent solution in place via legislation. That isn't possible and he is misleading the public by implying it is.