Skip to main content

They should have left Apple alone from the beginning

Bill Barr looks mad.


It now appears that there was never any reason for the US Justice Department to pick any fight with Apple over the encryption of its iPhones.

Things happen so quickly now that events from as far back as 2015 are chiefly forgotten, but I'm going to resurrect this one. On December 2 of that year, a married couple targeted a Christmas Party being held by the San Bernardino Health Department to commit a terrorist attack. They killed 14 people and seriously injured another 22.

Authorities covered one of the conspirators' work phones (they successfully destroyed their personal phone.) It was an Apple.

In the aftermath of that attack, the US Justice Department received several court orders requiring Apple to cooperate with it is unlocking that phone. Apple objected to and challenged all such orders.

 As it happens, it was not necessary, for national security or for law enforcement or for any other urgent purpose, that Apple put itself in the business of ratting out its customers. Believe it or not, The FBI has quite clever computer geeks on the payroll, and the figured out how to get the information. Having got the information, they apparently determined that it was of no value. Farouk used his work phone for work data. 

  All of this is old settled news. Even as I say mostly forgotten. Or it was until last December, when we got a replay. This time it was a Saudi officer, training at the Naval Air Station at Pensacola, Florida, who killed three people and left behind two locked iPhones. And again the Justice Department, since put under new management, demanded Apple's help. They didn't get it. They didn't need it. 

 Yet Bill Barr is shocked, shocked, that Apple has any interest in keeping faith with its customer base. 

 Yes, Apple could create a "backdoor" allowing law enforcement types access. But as the company has aptly said: there is no such thing as a backdoor that works only for the phones of the bad guys. Also, there is no backdoor that is employable only by law enforcement with which you or I might sympathize. If the US Justice Department  can use a backdoor, then so can the analogs in North Korea. National security and privacy and not in this case opposed interests. They are one and the same.  

https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/5/18/21262731/fbi-apple-unlock-iphone-encryption-bill-barr-alshamrani
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti
7 comments
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers
Post a Comment
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak
13 comments
Read more