If you have not been under a rock for the last couple of weeks, you know all the basics of this story, but for our rock dwellers, here are the basics.
1. apple engineer looses iPhone prototype
2. passerby finds phone
3. passerby figures out its a prototype of a new device
4. passerby shops it around.
5. Gawker Media agrees and purchases device
6. Gawker publishes story, contacts apple to return phone
7. Apple accepts phone back
The end…..
8. WTF????? Prosecutors raid reporters home
Welcome to the police state of California.
This is where we have to start reporting the story. 1-7 could happen to any person and company in this business, even us. Other than step 5 if someone were to give it to us, of course we would write about it, we might be tempted to buy it, but we have a policy against paying for stories.
Where the line was crossed was when the police raided the reporters home.
As the Storm Troopers trample all over the constitution, somewhere Steve Jobs is smiling.
In our opinion, there is no way that this is not a case of Apple manipulating the system. Apple fan boys can scream foul all they want, but try this experiment: call your local police department and report your cell phone stolen, but given back to you after you asked. See if the results are anything like this. There are murderers, rapists, and child molesters walking the streets in every city in the world, and the police are wasting time, effort and money on this issue as well as trampling the constitution.
The constitutional issue here seems pretty clear. The police seized a lot and went way too far. Its as if one person on Yahoo committed a crime and law enforcement shut down Yahoo, confiscated the servers and backups and read EVERYONES correspondence.
That seems extreme, but is exactly what happened here.
An easier analogy is let's say your neighbor steals a lawnmower, you then borrow your neighbor's lawnmower, put it in your garage, mow your lawn, and then find out he stole it from the neighbor three doors down and return it to him. Then he decides you didn’t ask his permission first to use it and calls the police and reports it stolen. The police come and clean out your whole house, take your car(s), all your furniture, all your appliances, all your food, all your tools, dishes, silverware etc. and leave you with an empty house, when the only issue was the stolen lawnmower that you returned already.