The underwear drawer analogy highlights the schism here. On one hand, for people who don't think of their phone as "an extension of their brain" (to use a phrase I've seen here), it's puzzling to think we'd be on board with letting police search our most intimate places with a warrant, but not our phones. To those convinced that there is no way to allow reasonable access to law enforcement without allowing unlimited access to hackers, that position doesn't make sense.
My brain is not my underwear drawer. Sure, I'm going to be upset with you rummaging through my underwear drawer but there is a very good reason why regarding a phone as an "extension of the brain" should afford it much greater protection. Possibly even ultimate protection, that is in-accessible regardless of warrant.
My point is that if you see a phone just as a gadget, like I imagine Obama does, it is hard to see why it should get more protection than something really intimate like the inside of someone's house. That's the heart of why the two sides view this issue so differently.
Personally, I don't consider my phone any more private than my desk drawer. I don't put anything on my phone that I wouldn't write down on a piece of paper. I know some do, and they're entitled to their view, but I find Obama's underwear analogy pretty convincing because I think of a phone just as a gadget.
I'm sure you already know this argument, but it bears re-mentioning. It's not the things you directly store on your phone -- it's everything else. Your phone tracks where you go, what opinions you post about various things and when, the people you communicate with, your money, and your correspondence. Apple is making the case that your phone could basically turn into a traveling wiretap, listening to everything you say. I even saw a recent article that said folks are looking into using your phone to track when you have sex. The iPhone health app, if used, is about as personal as I could imagine anything being.
None of that bears on what sorts of extremely personal information you may or may not voluntarily choose to additionally put on your phone. In the aggregate, however, it's about as intimate as you can get.
I understand the "I don't put anything personal on my phone" statement. I feel the same way. But that doesn't mean that there aren't extremely personal and sensitive pieces of information on there -- information I would not want to be sharing with others without my consent.
The scale of this is the problem. A government mandated back door sets up a single point of failure for every phone in the world.
My other worry is that strong encryption already creates a black box. Obama is against the existence of black boxes, so the next logical step after government mandated back doors for phones is requiring that you share any encryption keys with the government.
But that's not the argument, and framing it as such is incredibly disingenuous on the part of Obama.
People aren't arguing whether government should have the right to search your phone. They have that right. I support them having that right (when under a lawful order).
The argument is whether manufacturers should be forced to weaken the security of their devices so that law enforcement can break in. In this, there is no difference between the physical and digital realms: we don't require safe manufacturers to build in government skeleton keys either.
