The more I read about the case of FBI v. Apple, the less sympathetic I am to Apple. It should tell you something that Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, and Richard Epstein, the prominent libertarian legal scholar, have come out in favor of the government’s position here. And, no, I doubt that Gates is taking a stand against Apple simply because of his longstanding rivalry with that firm; he is smart enough to know that these issues affect Microsoft, too. (In fairness, Apple does have on surprising defender–former CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden.)

Perhaps the strongest case against Apple has been made by New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and his deputy commissioner for counter-terrorism, John J. Miller in this op-ed.They begin by pointing out, as have others, that the cell phone Apple refuses to unlock belonged to the County of San Bernardino and was used by a dead terrorist who by definition has no privacy rights. They also point out that Apple is a Johnny-come-lately to the privacy battle:

Until 17 months ago, Apple held the key that could override protections and open phones. Apple used this “master key” to comply with court orders in drug, kidnapping, murder and terrorism cases. There was no documented instance of this code getting out to hackers or to the government. So what was the problem Apple was trying to fix when it abruptly announced, in September 2014, that with its new iOS 8, “Apple will not perform iOS data extractions in response to government search warrants”?

Apple now claims that opening Syed Rizwan Farook’s cell phone would run an unacceptable risk of hackers breaking into other Apple phones. But is there any evidence that hackers took advantage of Apple’s willingness to break into phones that operated previous versions of its operating system?

Moreover, they note, “Apple’s position on privacy seems at odds with its own strategy of encouraging customers to pay to store personal data on iCloud, which is also vulnerable to hackers.”  Indeed, as the New York Times noted in another article. Apple still complies with law enforcement requests to iCloud on a regular basis: “In its most recent report, covering the first six months of 2015, Apple received nearly 11,000 requests from government agencies around the world regarding information on roughly 60,000 devices. Apple provided some data in roughly 7,100 of those requests, the report said.”

So why does Apple think it’s OK to unlock the data on the iCloud but not on the iPhone? It is impossible to draw any principled distinction here. One can only conclude that, as the government contends, Apple is essentially making a business decision to appeal to customers paranoid about security–and especially to foreign customers paranoid about NSA intrusions–by highlighting their refusal to unlock even a single iPhone.

But Apple’s die-hard stance is leading that company and its defenders to an untenable position: They seem to be suggesting that the Fourth Amendment, which grants the government the right to obtain search warrants for “houses, papers, and effects” — and which has long been used to allow the government to obtain phone records and to wiretap phone calls — does not apply to the latest generation of iPhones. Apple CEO Tim Cook seems to think that iPhones should be safe zones for terrorists and criminals.

Apple’s refusal to cooperate with such a high-profile terrorism investigation could easily backfire, as Gordon Crovitz suggests, by leading Congress to legislate a “backdoor” for encrypted devices that is the last thing that technology companies want. At the very least it is tarnishing Apple’s corporate image. Apple would be well advised to rethink its self-defeating decision to go to war with a government that it counts on to provide not only security and services but also protection of its most precious asset–its intellectual property.