In many cities, apparently public areas are private property and people's rights are restricted there. This article describes the UK.

New York City has done it too, for instance in Zucotti Park.

Mèdecins Sans Frontiéres has decided to stop telling Assad and Russia where its medical facilities are located.

It believes that they attack these facilities intentionally.

A Pentagon report in 2012 predicted that support for the (mainly Islamist) anti-Assad rebels in Syria was likely to result in a "Salafist Principality", basically something like PISSI.

That's what Salafi Arabia and Turkey wanted, but why did the US support them? Even in 2012, some in the Pentagon knew that the Syrian rebels were mainly Islamists. That doesn't mean Obama and his advisers knew this — but if not, they should have.

The US may have expected this "Salafist Principality" to be more like Salafi Arabia rather than the actual PISSI. That is hardly an excuse.

If Apple makes a modified iThing decryption program to facilitate trying more decryption keys, that will affect all users of iThings.

Apple's current defense of one aspect of user's privacy would be admirable if it were the whole story. In fact, it is the exception among a long string of abuses.

The article mentions one of the malicious functionalities of the iPhone and the iBad: they are tyrant devices. This means they do not allow the user to run an operating system that wasn't signed by Apple. This gives Apple total power over the user.

Schneier says that "either everyone gets security, or no one does." For the iThings, it's the latter. No user of an iThing has security against Apple, because Apple can do any nasty thing whatsoever in the next "upgrade". It is infamous for mistreating its own users.

In general, no user of proprietary software has any security against the program's developer.

Snowden explains why the FBI's demands to Apple are unnecessary.

Specifically,

1. The FBI already has all of the suspects' communications records — who they talked to and how — as these are stored by service providers, not on the phone itself.
2. The FBI has received comprehensive backups of all the suspects' data until just 6 weeks before the crime.
3. Copies of the suspects' contacts with co-workers — the FBI claimed interest — are available in duplicate from those co-workers' phones.
4. The phone in controversy is a government-issued work phone, subjected to consent-to-monitoring, not a secret terrorist communications device. The "operational" phones believed to be hiding incriminating information, recovered by the FBI during a search, were physically destroyed, not "shielded by Apple."
5. Alternative means for gaining access to this device — and others — exist that do not require the manufacturer's assistance.