Just as a side note.
In my opinion design and interfacing are part of the functionality - which is an aspect that
many feature ridden products neglect - and which is an area where apple is a leader.

What really concerns me with the iPhone is that there is no control for net access.
While every application using GPS must be confirmed internet access is possible.
I would like to see something like a an app-whitelist to manage that.

Turning the data-modes off in the preferences is imho very inconvenient, but of course is
the most secure solution.

Who knows :)

Maybe it ends up as a spy vs. spy game and the agencies use cunning plans working with that situation. I only hope that they are up to the new information realities - and I doubt that.
(I live in germany - but I think we have a similar situation. And the the police is heavily underfunded for state-of-the-art work - imho, of course)

The thing is that I do not believe that "War" should be fought in the way it is and that there is a solution of any kind as long as it always ends in the extremes (no drugs vs. all drugs - I think there is some middle ground). But that is not the topic.

I cannot assess the legal situation here, but another aspect of the story is interesting:
Is it that easy for a - maybe crazy - person to gather all that (confidential or not) information about the police/DEA officers than
I think it is rather save to assume that the big time drug dealers/cartels already use the same methods (including honey-trap style personal information gathering etc.) and have most likely a pretty good picture of the law enforcement situation. That does not bode well for the War on Drugs (or whatever it is called...)
 

The only thing I think apple should change is to open up the dev-plattform to windows/linux users.
They could tap into the already strong (often) windows/linux based "open" dev community.
That would boost the number of apps far higher.
They have 10k+ apps from mac developers alone, and that is only a small part of the active dev community (...are there any hard numbers on how developers split between the systems? I assume here that there are many more non mac-developers available).