At the White House, many officials worried about being accused of becoming an accessory to China’s growing crackdowns on dissidents. In fact, the fear paralyzed some of them. But FBI officials quickly waved away this argument. “We’re not the State Department,” one of Comey’s top aides told me. The rest of the intelligence community seemed likewise unconcerned. Just days after the Apple announcement, the director of one of America’s sixteen intelligence agencies invited me to his office to rail against Apple’s top executives.
