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> 1 - To whom do you suggest the government should be accountable?

Other governments and ultimately the citizenry as a whole.

> if Apple cannot comply without endangering every iPhone owner, then the other owners of iPhones have a stake in the outcome

They do not. No more than owners of doors when the FBI executes a warrant.

> The government's right to investigate this crime doesn't expand to the right to endanger millions of people's privacy and security.

No plausible mechanism has ever been put forward where this would be the case.

> Libertarian philosophy doesn't suggest that you have a right to hurt other people, unless in self-defense.

Right, they attempted to coerce your staff on your premesis into acting against their own interests. This is a violation of the NAP and therefore any level of violence in self defence is justified.

This is one of the most core Libertarian beliefs.



I am reminding myself of this XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/386/, but at the risk of wasting our time...

You said that in Somalia, the government is accountable to the citizenry. Yet you suggest that that's legitimate ("...ultimately to the citizenry as a whole..."). If I personally object to a law, do I have any recourse? What if my town does? My state? My region? At what point does it become immoral for the government to ignore change requests?

The door analogy is clever, but inaccurate. It is not possible to transmit door keys (or battering rams) via email, and use them to simultaneously bash open the doors of millions of people. Creating a method by which a phone can be cracked weakens the security of the phone for all users, including innocent users. So the FBI is asking to weaken the security of all phone users. The "plausible mechanism" would be "hacker pays off an apple dev for a copy of the hackable OS".

The last point doesn't make sense to me. Firstly, in a hypothetical libertarian legal system, corporations would not have a right to self-defense, or any other rights, as they are not humans. Even in individual cases, any level of violence in self defense is definitely not justified. When you said "...Apple would be justified in torturing and executing the FBI agents on their property...", that's saying that trespassing warrants murder, which I do not claim.




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