The “back door” to smartphones: needed tool or bound to be abused?

Where to draw the line?

That certainly seems to be the seminal question that courts — and society in general — must address and answer with some clarity regarding what FBI Director James Comey calls “the hardest question I’ve seen in government.”

That question concerns privacy expectations on the one hand and the government’s need to access information to fight crime — such as murder or child pornography — on the other.

The quandary is perfectly — and painfully — demonstrated by the recent case involving the smartphone of one of the mass killers in last year’s chilling terrorist attack in San Bernardino.

The FBI can’t crack the encrypted phone’s passcode to access material evidence it thinks might exist. And Apple, the maker of the iPhone, isn’t predisposed to helping open up the phone’s contents via the creation of a so-called “back door.”

The case is currently being litigated and could perhaps end up being debated by justices of the U.S. Supreme Court pursuant to their definitive legal ruling in the matter.

The privacy-versus-enforcement argument centered on smartphones and other mobile devices is divisive, to say the least.

Apple’s privacy-strengthened phones and uncompromising attitude favoring users’ privacy “is preventing me from taking a murderer (or, by implication, that above-cited child sexual abuser) off the streets,” says one government attorney.

That view is echoed by U.S. Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who, along with Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), is working to craft legislation focused upon the problematic issue. Burr recently wrote that Apple’s phones are tools employed by “murderers, pedophiles, drug dealers and the others … to cover their tracks.”

The idea that there must be some regulatory access to encrypted information is far from universal, though. Many privacy groups and constitutional scholars oppose it. And a recent Reuters poll revealed that nearly half of all respondents agree with Apple’s uncooperative stance.

There is, of course, no disagreement among reasonable people that sexual abusers of children and other violent criminals must be caught and punished.

A more perplexing query for many Americans relates to precisely how far government actors can go and what type of actions they can take to stop those wrongdoers.

Ever-evolving technology seems likely to keep that thorny question a front-and-center concern.