Gene Policinski: Terror, disgust should not prompt quick limits on freedoms

  Apple might become irrelevant, for the moment, in the FBI’s attempts to pry data from a terrorist’s iPhone, but not so the privacy issues raised by the legal collision involved.

  A $140 million verdict in the Hulk Hogan sex tape case may be reduced, but not so the warning signals it sends to more than the largely unrestrained world of online gossip mongers — perhaps to all who dish and comment critically across the Web.

  And as news of terror attacks in Brussels zipped instantly around the world in our 24/7, interconnected age, controversial political proposals implicating religious liberty and free speech arose even before the smoke had cleared from the targeted airport hall and subway stop.

Richard Cohen: Your iPhone and J. Edgar Hoover

  Following the Watergate scandal in the mid-1970s, the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities – popularly known as the Church Committee – issued reports revealing that federal agencies had spied on U.S. citizens for years.

  In one of the most notorious episodes, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI targeted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as part of its infamous counter intelligence program – COINTELPRO in the Bureau’s lingo – all in the name of “national security.”

  Today, in the digital age, our surveillance tools are much more powerful than they were in the days when the FBI tapped King’s phone and bugged his hotel rooms. That’s why the legal dispute between Apple and the FBI is so important.