I think this is a fantastic article - and I thought it was genuinely funny, but my sense of humor is about 80% butt jokes so I think that's just an unusual alignment of my taste with the author's ;).<p>Now, allow me to take this article about irreduceable complexity and reduce its complexity: the question is not even about which shade of security gray to go with. It's an ongoing psychological battle between security and security theater, which is an unrelated set of activities that is almost, but not entirely, exactly unlike actual security.<p>Security theater operates on the level of what feels right, instead of what is logically right. That makes it powerful. It offers an appearance and feeling of safety, and there's value in that. Of course, if you ask someone "do you want a phone that feels safe or is actually safe," they'll pick the latter, but actually, they want and need both.<p>That's the problem with this issue. The general public doesn't feel the difference between these two domains clearly enough to know how dangerous the governments plan for the iPhone is - they don't understand that it shifts the balance wholly from security to security theater, when what you actually want is a blend of both. You need The Great Tagliatelle and the locked cockpit door. You need laminated paper and you need to have pilots with secret codes. Without security, an iPhone will still FEEL safe - it just won't be.<p>The problem is, feeling safe is good enough for most. That's why we mostly have metal locks and not giant flaming Doberman-lauching turrets on our lawns. Until the public gets the need for a balance, this debate will go nowhere fast, and the government - who is very used to getting its way - will skillfully play on our desire to feel safe in order to get what it needs.