Substantial noise has been generated over the past several days concerning the fate of a colored plastic iPhone. The debate concerns whether Apple should provide agents of United States which would allow them to more effectively defeat iOS encryption through brute force. Given Apple's history of collaboration with this sort of agent it is perfectly reasonable to assume the assistance requested by the FBI from Apple has already been rendered (archived). So, why the loud public debate?

Loud polarized debates have tremendous social engineering value. Reality with its actual history is irrelevant to the social engineer. The social engineer instead values images and ideas. People with knowledge of the world are empowered to independently make judgements about their world based on real events and actual history in physical reality. This is undesirable for the social engineer and their fellow socialists who require soft, fungible, and disposable masses for their pliability. The polarized debate is supremely effective for cultivating this pliability by tempting persons to accept at least some premises of one or both sides of the debate with no necessary connection to reality.

Let us consider a number of probable untruths being promoted by this debate:

Apple is a champion of privacy against governments when they have colluded with government in the past to develop surveillance programs like PRISM.

iPhone encryption is impervious to state level actors while seeded with 4 and 6 digit PINs when a substantial number of technically oriented commentators are conceding that arbitrary firmware measures to thwart brute forcing are the only defense and they could be circumvented with different firmware.

iPhone device encryption offers protection for communications though communications necessarily leave the phone, hit the wire, and exist in places other than that particular phone's memory.

The law constrains the actions of United States Government and its agents, when it practices disregard for the law as a standard course of action.

That court orders and declarations by fiat hold any actual power against strong, well implemented encryption.

There are other probable falsehoods presented with these separately and together in a variety of differing combinations. The point of priming and promoting this debate is exposing persons to these ideas so they might accept or repeat them, and the value judgements made by persons with respect to where they stand on these ideas is completely irrelevant to the social engineer's purposes. The most curious actual fact surrounding when this debate got loud is that it happened after the supreme court justice most hostile to unconstitutional search and seizures died not long before.