No, I am not talking about Adam and Eve in the garden. I am referring to Apple's refusal to create a "backdoor" or hack or whatever that will make it possible to circumvent the encryption on an iPhone. The alleged reason is to get info off of the now deceased San Bernadino Islamist shooters. Something this simple seems like a no brainer, of course Apple creates this workaround. Except they won't and an awful lot of people across the political spectrum support them. What is the big deal?
If this request was made to Apple more than say 5 years ago I don't think it would have caused a stir. Now people are up in arms and I agree with them. Our faith in our government and other institutions is at an all time low. Nobody that is paying attention except Bernie Sanders and his acolytes thinks the government is trustworthy. We don't want a way created to allow the government to invade more of our privacy. How long do you think this workaround will stay secure? The idea that the government has nothing but our best interests in mind is ludicrous today.
Even if the government gets it's way and the phone is hacked, do we really think there is critical information on there? They are dead so we don't need the evidence for a trial. It has been more than two months and anyone who is an Islamist wannabe terrorist knows that the government has this phone in their possession and unless they are complete morons they will change whatever they can that might be compromised if the information on the phone becomes known. I have to assume that since much of the terror network worldwide is very tech savvy that they use pseudonyms, code words, throw away no contract and anonymous phones, etc.
In 2016 we have Donald Trump poised to be the nominee of the Republican party and the very real possibility that a kookie Socialist will be the Democrat nominee. This is the result of 8 years of (I believe) well intentioned incompetence by George W. Bush and 7 years of arrogant and willful incompetence by Barack Obama. After 15 years of that it is little wonder that the populace is ready to nominate and elect a guy worth 4 billion dollars who changes positions as often as he changes ties. We just don't trust the government. Sure some neo-con types like Charles Krauthamer think that we should give more access to our privacy and liberty to the same government he makes a living complaining about but for the most part there is an awful lot of agreement with Apple.
Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us for the better part of a century, shame on us.
1 comment:
Terrorists are surprisingly not tech savvy - no more so than a typical millenial. The Paris attacks were coordinated at least in part over plain, unencrypted text messages. Even the French government backed away from demanding "back doors" (which don't exist in cryptography - a weakness is a weakness) after realizing that cryptography didn't play a role in keeping the attacks secret. As most security experts will tell you, people are just bad at securing digital communication, and that includes terrorists.
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