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Apple, basically: 'If it pleases the court, tell FBI to go fuck themselves'

Xeni Jardin

NYPD officer across the street from Apple's 5th Ave. store, NYC, March 11, 2016. REUTERS

The intensifying legal battle between Apple and the Government of the United States of America is blowing my mind. The legal briefs coming out of Cupertino are awesome reading for those of us who care about silly stuff like freedom and liberty and iPhones. Here are some of the excerpts everyone was talking about on Twitter today.

On Twitter today, forensic scientist and O’Reilly author Jonathan Ździarski highlighted notable snippets of new legal briefs filed by Apple, which you can read here on Mashable‘s servers.

‏“Here,” tweets Ździarski about the snippet screengrabbed above, “Apple is saying, ‘If it pleases the court, tell the FBI to go fuck themselves.’”

From Ździarski’s analysis today of what may happen next in FBI vs. Apple:

Should the government have carte blanche rights to force anyone to work for them? Should the privacy of people’s entire past be subject to a warrant? Should people be allowed to have private conversations, private thoughts, private ideas – all things stored on people’s iPhones – subject to search by the government? I am honestly in shock, and saddened by the fact that any of these questions could be raised at all in this country. The fundamental construct of our constitution, and the basic human rights they were based on, have answered these questions for hundreds of years – a free society cannot live without privacy. A free society cannot live without freedom from tyranny. A free society cannot live without free speech, or under the fear that your speech and thoughts will be used to imprison you. The questions that the Department of Justice is posing, at the very core of the matter, are questions of whether or not we should be a free people. The very government that we founded to protect our liberties is now, in a very raw way, questioning them.

This should shock you. It should shock every American, and it is no doubt shocking the rest of the watching world. How can the freest country in the world, a beacon for those in oppressive countries, lay down their speech, their privacy, their identities over a dead terrorist’s iPhone? The shootings that took place in San Bernardino were horrible and flat out evil, and I mourned for the victims… but the greatest damage that Syed Farook stands to cause is to our country and our constitutional rights as a whole; giving up our rights will ultimately affect the liberty and safety of generations to come. Make no mistake about it – Syed Farook would be pleased to see this agenda being played out in the court system today. We should not be pleased. We should be indignant. We should be deeply offended. Offended that anyone would attempt to curtail rights that our families have died, and continue dying, to protect.

More from Ździarski’s tweeted analysis, and that of others who read the brief, below.

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