> And phrased like that, everybody will answer yes.

The normal, non-technologists I know would most certainly find the idea that their passwords could be changed against their will--or, in the absence of their assent after death--pretty unsettling and inherently wrong. It's relatively trivial to provide analogous (though not entirely homologous) situations--e.g., should the government be able to force your mortgage company to change the locks on your house so they can get in to execute a search warrant?--that people would have immediate pause and find it worth considering. I don't know many people who would just thumbs up the suggestion that Facebook could be forced by the government to change/disable their account password. Or their banking passwords, email password, etc. If people became aware of a national conversation focused on the government trying to secure the power/precedent to force Facebook, Google, Apple, etc. to change/disable their passwords via a court order, I think very many more people will refuse to accept such an issue at face-value.

> The dire implications of this case are not that easy to explain to someone who doesn't understand the basics of encryption/security.

HN is a predictably poor place to discuss gaining widespread understanding by the masses on certain things. We too often fall into the trap of thinking that people must understand technical details of some thing X in order to understand implications of related thing Y. I think this is nonsense. People don't need to understand all the math and physics behind rocket science to understand that an unexpected explosion during liftoff has dire implications. We can explain that to people without ever showing them an equation, or talking about scientific laws/principles. There is no reason we cannot have a meaningful and productive conversation on this issue without losing the majority of American citizens as soon as we bring up the technical details.

Technologists haven't gotten much of anywhere getting the average American to understand, much less know why they should care about, encryption. Hell, we still engage in arguments here on HN about why you shouldn't roll your own encryption, even though all the programmers out there should already know that. We simply aren't going to get anywhere saying we first have to educate normal people on encryption. And it's plain wrong to think that an issue like this needs to be framed within a context that requires people to understand the basics of encryption. That's a no-win trajectory for carrying on a public conversation. You simply have to appeal to people using language that isn't overly biased, presents issues in the simplest possible ways (and builds up from there), and actually gets them involved in the conversation. It would, without any doubt, be fantastic if more people understood encryption, digital security, digital privacy, etc. But Average Joes and Janes don't really think about the devices and services they use in that way. I know a great many people who are [what I think are] normal, non-technical citizens, and their eyes just glaze over at talk of encryption--much like how many people's eyes glaze over at seeing mathematical equations, as if they're looking at Japanese.

The reason there is a higher propensity among potential Average American poll respondents to support the FBI on this issue is the way it's being framed. All I'm saying is that it's just as possible, and actually necessary, to frame the issue in a way that helps average Americans understand the dire implications of this case without having any need for understanding the basics of encryption, iOS, the Secure Enclave, trusted/signed code from Apple, and everything else that most HNers are discussing here.

> We too often fall into the trap of thinking that people must understand technical details of some thing X in order to understand implications of related thing Y.

Is that what you got from my post? Because it's not what I meant at all. I don't believe people have to understand the technical details behind it, but they do have to understand that the FBI forcing an unlock sets a very bad precedent which would massively diminish the security of the iphone/next iphone and this would apply to everybody, not just the tewwowist, AND that they're using a super old obscure shady law to back all that. There is a lot of data to understand and you can't easily grasp that from a single, short sentence.

Ah, my apologies then. This explanation sounds very different from your original suggestion that people need a basic understanding of encryption/security. I think we are quite close in agreement here.

I can see how my comment was misleading. My point was that those with a ground knowledge of encryption/security would most likely easily deduce this - but that doesn't mean you need such knowledge to understand what's going on.