I disagree. The current setup is like having the real estate have a key and you have a swipe card. The swipe card let’s you into parts of the house but you don’t have access to the basement or electrical box. If you wanted access to those you could ask but the real estate basically says no unless they really messed up, and even then they send a tradesperson to do the work and give them the key. If that tradespersons loses the key or gives it to someone else the real estate shrugs and says “What do you want us to do about it? Security is hard.”

They also have a contract for all the furniture, most of which is bolted down, so you can’t even rearrange your house, let alone install a hand rail in the bathroom for your disabled brother who needs support getting in and out. You also can’t install anything on the walls like a TV or a picture frame, and attempting to do so would lead to the possibility of piercing a pipe or cutting a wire in the wall because you don’t have schematics.

You can’t put a different OS on, you can’t modify the one you have, and breaking any of the protections on software is a violation of the DMCA, so you are a renter. You rent the device, they control the features, they decide what parts are available to the public (usually none), they decide when it will be end of life, and they make it very technically difficult to repair anything by using parts pairing. If they sold the device as a subscription with hardware upgrades included, repairs included, ongoing support included, then maybe locking it down would be OK, but otherwise no, it is unreasonable and I don’t think we really own our devices in a meaningful sense.

This is simply incorrect. Implementing a lock on a bootloader is not dissimilar to a lock on your house. A person breaking in doesn’t care that they are breaking the law, they just need to find the how of breaking in. If I as a consumer want to enter my house or give a copy of my key to someone else as a backup I should be able to do so. If I want to leave my door unlocked I should have that right however foolhardy it is. And when it comes to locking the bootloader of a computer most people won’t notice it in general use but that isn’t the point. It is about the edge cases, the end of life for the device, the lack of security updates.

To clarify, the charges brought in the Florida district could have been brought in another venue, but the crime was the documents being withheld in Florida, so that is the correct venue. It could have gotten way through the process and been appealed due to incorrect venue and we would have been back at the start.

That said, I think getting Cannon removed would have been more likely to bear fruit. She had clear evidence of bias and would have been way past the threshold of appearance of impropriety, so getting her removed would have been a fairly likely path to success. Unfortunately the supreme court was so flooded by idealogues that it would have been appealed and they would have either held it up or overturned it and gotten her back on, or just dismissed the case in some other way.

What was needed was a much more aggressive approach from both Biden and Garland. Biden to change the number of supreme court justices and to direct his justice department to deeply investigate all of the justices on the court. Garland to open said investigations, push for intelligence agency support, and lots of speaking indictments to get information in front of voters.