A patriot would pay its fair share of taxes.

Au contraire, a patriot would not enable the State by funding its superfluous wars, banksters, and State cronies.

A patriot would do what he can to starve the Leviathan monster, not continue to feed it.

A patriot would help productive fellow citizens avoid the State's plunder altogether.

A patriot doesn't define "fair share" by whatever random numbers some self-serving politician and other government kleptocrats come up with. And only victims of the "public" education would think that patriotism is somehow equated with the desire to subject fellow citizens to such arbitrary theft extorted through violence or the threat thereof.

On a serious note, that was really quite good. On the other hand, it is perhaps a little easy to convince people to stick up for Apple, considering how ubiquitous iPhones and other iThings are in the US.

Someone that could really use this sort of supportive message campaign is Edward Snowden, without whom we wouldn't know just how *much* the Government and all the 3-letter agencies are trying to skirt the constitution. He doesn't have the benefit of the degree of public appreciation that Apple does (even though I think he is *more* deserving of it -- not to take anything away from Apple doing the right thing here)...

McAfee is not someone you want to publicly be in your camp. I thought he was actually still wanted for murder, and he certainly doesn't have a clean history of rational behavior.

It's insane that the feds have repeatedly, and under oath, claimed this is a one time thing...when it's clear that there are hundreds and hundreds of other phones they, and other government organizations want and plan to unlock with the 'tool' today, not to mention how they'll use it tomorrow, or what happens when it's 'released into the wild', which WILL happen. Government internet security is a joke.

No surprise at all that Trump is on the wrong side of this issue.

EDIT: Really, a downvote for that ^ comment? Someone has their panties in a bunch.

Haha! First of all, they are tax avoiders, not tax dodgers. Secondly, if you don't like it, why don't you work your way up at Apple and change the company from the inside? Or become a legislator and change the law. See if you can get them to pay whatever version of "fair share" you think they "should." (We all know you won't because, if you did, you wouldn't be using a platform or a device created by companies that don't care about what you think their "fair share" of taxes should be.) But, hey, go ahead and "boycott" Apple and other companies to "protest" their failure to adopt your ideas and definitions of "fair shares." See how far that gets you. I'll continue to buy their products and support them.

And meanwhile, the vilified "millionaires and billionaires" will continue to pay far more in taxes than you ever will (currently 44% of federal taxes while the bottom 45% don't pay anything at all) -- just so we're clear on who contributes little to nothing at all and is merely a consumer/loser.

I wonder how the USA would fare if every tax eligible citizen did as thorough job at tax avoidance as many multi-nationals that are happy to lobby to keep the status-quo?

Ask Italy, UK, Australia, and many other progressive countries what they think their shifting profits strategy.

Some people may look up to their valid strategy, but they are in fact thieving from the regular citizen who does not have their accounting capability. The government who also equally supports the multinational needs to make up their shortfall, and therefore the regular citizen suffers.

I own plenty of Apple stock, but they are also not citizen friendly in any way.

They aren't concerned about privacy so much as weakening their code, which will leave them vulnerable to customer anger and possibly lawsuits later on.

Trust me, after having worked for them for years, I can unequivocally declare that if they could figure out a way to give the government a permanent backdoor while still protecting themselves, they would in a heartbeat. Therefore, they aren't so much a patriot as they are a mercenary.

The main issue is that they can unlock individual units, which they have done before for the FBI, but that means that the FBI and other agencies have to get a new warrant each time. The Feebs don't want to do that, they would prefer a blanket unlock that would nicely bypass the 4th Amendment and allow them to access your digital information at any time. Unfortunately, a blanket unlock method would leak out into the wild at some point and leave everyone open completely. Apple has had that happen before, notably during the early phases of .Mac/MobileMe, and the legal department got slammed with claims/suits because the unlock workaround leaked.

Every tax-eligible citizen should do everything legally possible to avoid paying taxes. Most do (to the best of their abilities). And most people get nothing at all in return for their tax money, since most if not all of it goes to pay for stuff they don't want or need (like, say, the unpayable $19 trillion debt) or for stuff they could get somewhere else far more cheaply.

So, if Apple's so villainous, why not dump their stock in protest (that is, of course, if you really cared, which I doubt you do)?

The legal responsibility of Apple (along with all publicly traded corporations) is to maximize shareholder profits. If they act against those interests, then their management is liable, acting illegally, and susceptible to lawsuits.

That's the law and their "patriotic" duty. Their manufacture of popular products is the way they have gone about doing just that.

In China, by contrast, Apple has no problem unlocking phones or complying with the Chinese rulers' requests. But in the US, why should they comply if they don't have to (and it's their legal duty to act on behalf of their stock holders' interests)? They have already said that if they lose their legal battle, they will comply with whatever legal requirements. It would still be their duty to use any and all loopholes at their disposal to act in service to their shareholders' best interests, however they see fit. It's the State's problem to deal with such muddles, if the law is what it is. Not Apple's.

It's the same as with Apple's avoidance of taxes. Apple has the legal (and ethical) responsibility to avoid paying taxes however the law permits them to do so, and to not pay unnecessarily more than they have to do so. Again, they have that legal responsibility towards their shareholders.

The tax code, for anyone who looks it, is completely arbitrary. There is no "right" amount or percentage that anyone person or group "should" be taxed or is "fair" to be taxed. Such amounts are arbitrary and certainly not determined by some user's preference on videosift. (This is why videosift has no say in how much anyone pays in taxes or what the tax code actually says.)

I pay taxes on my profit on Apple shares/dividends, does that blow your mind?

I actually get a heap of stuff in return for paying taxes too, roads, education, emergency services, water, electricity supply, security, aquaducts. i.e. a decent civilization. Apple supposedly wants to be home based in that decent civilization and yet doesn't want to contribute to its upkeep like the rest of us.

Suspending my disbelief that you owned Apple stock for the time-being, I wonder how much you paid on Apple's "profit" taxes? And, on what specifically? Dividends? Selling stock? Did you pay more than you were legally required to pay?

At any rate, you won't ever get Apple to pay more than they're legally required to pay, but feel free to whine about it. It'll make zero difference.

Companies will continue avoiding as much taxation as they can (and so will most individuals). You can complain about corporate executives not paying "enough" (based on your arbitrary numbers as to what's "fair"), while they will continue to pay far more in taxes than you will ever make.

Your "contribution" to civilization is no doubt negligible (to say nothing of the state's wasteful use of tax dollars used to build a "decent civilization," the vast majority of which -- unbeknownst to you -- goes to the ways and means of slaughtering innocent people overseas). You must be very proud... or maybe you just don't care.

Saying that "Taxation is the price we pay for a decent civilization" is the same as saying that "Human sacrifice is the price we pay for having a sun."

Such "primitive" ideology (with its absurd beliefs, fetishes, taboos, and weirdnesses) is reflected by a belief in strange elites as being either godlike ("Bernie!") or demonic ("Koch!"), along with a total ignorance about the functioning of the (alien) banking system and the military empire that it feeds.

I don't really care about their taxes. I was simply illustrating that they unlock phones (individually by request with a warrant), that they got burned the last time they left a backdoor in a product, and that they are completely mercenary. The mercenary part is in line with what you said, they have only a responsibility to the shareholders to return a profit.

If they were doing this to safeguard the 4th Amendment only, then that would be patriotic.

I understand that what you say is true, but do they unlock phones with this OS, or specific security, or just older phones that don't have the auto erase feature built in? They've made the case that this is a new thing, brought about by their new attempt to make it impossible for even them to unlock phones in an effort to get around the warrants, knowing they'll sell more phones if those phones can't be 'cracked', even with a warrant. IF that's true, this is a new case and not the same as the phones they 'cracked' in the past.

Well, I left the company in 2012, so I had to double-check with a friend that still works there. Apparently the situation is that while they can reset the password limit, it will still do the auto-erase if you reach the attempt limit.

So in the case of any iPhone running the latest OS, the data would be non-retrievable. He also told me that they plan to remove the option to reset the password limit completely in the next version, meaning that if you screw up enough times, it is an auto-erase and nothing can be done.

I can only imagine how the support call is going to go the first time they have to tell the customer that.

QFT.

The hilarious thing is that all of this is completely unnecessary.

Firstly, it's of questionable value anyway. I have seen little evidence that Farook wasn't acting pretty much alone. Even if the unlock his phone, they'll probably just find he likes ISIS on facebook or follows some well known twitter accounts.

But more importantly, all of the data on the phone would have been backed up to iCloud, which Apple does have access to and was willing to turn over to the government.

But then some muppet in the FBI changed the password

Yeah, these are really the kind of geniuses we want deciding how companies should write secure software.

And forget taxes, Apple should use some of their $18 billion profit (for a quarter!!!!) and pay their workers in China a decent wage. Seriously, it works out at just a few percent of their profits.

It is surprising when it gets down to it ...the company's defend this to the government instead of the other way around.

The government sniffs into its populace too much already.
They don't need encouragement.

I really wish Obama would weigh in on this, he has a very practical nature to him.