Legal Experts Condemn Apple Bowing to White House's Request to Remove Iceblock

But you did show your hand so I guess we all benefited in some way.

Do you think apps like waze should also be illegal? What possible reason would you want location of speed trap except to speed with impunity? Moreover whether it "benefits criminals" is irrelevant here, because the current legal standard is imminent lawless action[1]. Otherwise that would be license to ban all manner of materials, from anarchists cookbook to DRM circumvention tools.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action

What if the real criminals were ICE all along?

This is the party line, but in practice ICE is not acting 100% within lines of the law. Unfortunately, it's possible for politicians, and even entire government agencies to lie. The evidence shows that ICE has both failed to enforce the law, and even follow the law themselves. This puts ICEBlock within other crime mapping or offender identifying tools.

There's an unbounded downside to allowing government too much power, including the power to act unobserved. Empowering criminals also has obvious drawbacks, but they're limited in scope.

"Rules for thee, not for me."

Those sympathetic to the American political right don't get to use that saying anymore, not even ironically. Not because it's offensive, but because they've effectively turned it into a tautology.

I have zero problem with fed-cops not being able to "do their job" in unfriendly jurisdictions without bringing serious amounts of force with them.

You mean the boogeyman that's been around for over a decade and precisely nothing has come of it? Moreover given the declining use of desktops/laptops, and the widespread prevalence of locked-down devices like smartphones, tablets, and streaming boxes, the battle over "locking down" has already been lost. If a company wants their app to run in a trusted environment, they can simply not offer a web version and enforce attestation (so you can't run it in an emulator or whatever).