Considering that the big problem with the San Bernardino iPhone is the fact that the FBI locked up the phone by trying to access one of the apps, it’s not about decryption.
I see these reports boiling down to one thing: people can use decryption, but the government wants to be allowed to override it at well… In other words, your information is safe, but it’s an open book for the government.
This reminds me of the US and Social Security Numbers. It’s only supposed to be used by the government. The government has been telling people for decades, don’t use them for identification, don’t give out your SSN.
But a lot of companies demand your SSN. They demand to see your card, and photocopy it. Your credit scores are totally based on your SSN. Identity thieves harvest SSNs, so they can open fraudulent bank accounts and commit credit card fraud.
One of the reasons people are turning to encryption is the fear of retaliation by the government for exercising free speech. There are other reasons, many of them valid. The government’s argument that only criminals would use encryption is laughable, and only serves to prove the point.
Yet some of the people who are so adamant about government over-reach are telling Apple that they should do what the FBI is demanding. Because, “law and order”! But I think we’ve seen enough instances of law enforcement being very poor at safeguarding people’s privacy and personal information. And government agencies leak. They all do.
It’s along the same lines as that old crock “If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear”. This one is pretty insidious - I even heard a very intelligent friend of mine come out with this once (I was pretty quick to jump on it).
I have this and this bookmarked and read them occasionally so I can have arguments to hand whenever someone pulls this one out.
“There was once such a thing called corporate responsibility,” Bratton said. “Now, it’s corporate irresponsibility.”
Screw you and the horse you road in on. It’s corporate responsibility to keep the people that work for us from having free access to our shit.
License plate scanners will only be used to catch criminals, and stalk ex girlfriends, and build travel patterns for people who might be guilty, and to do traffic analysis, and whatever the hell else we want to do with it peon.
All these assholes are going to do is create even stronger encryptions held in private hands.
Neither does refusing to prosecute hundreds of thousands of gun crimes a year.
(2) widespread Democratic indifference to the killing of foreigners where there’s no partisan advantage to be had against the GOP from pretending to care
All else being equal, this is why we are generally a more moral country with a Republican in office, not because he’s inherently more moral or anything, but because the press has a personal interest in attack dogging them.
That’s the sort of situation I bring up to anti gunners, and they can’t understand it. I think to some of them that half a dozen people with massive wounds from a hatchet and the police shooting this guy down is better than what happened here, and I just can’t understand why.
More info on the iPhone case: The Daily WTF has an “editor’s soapboax” which has some good points that he’s calling “Encryption by analogy”. And as happens so often, the video that’s embedded of the “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” segment explains the problems weaking/getting around the encryption. It’s even got two clips by a politician who switched to the “we can’t do this” side after he learned more details about what it would mean. Pretty informative stuff in the article and the video.
Yes, I watched that video earlier. It’s nice to know that someone else holds the same concerns about it, that I brought up at the beginning of the fiasco.
Johnson’s attorney, Chris Livingston, questioned why the charges were filed without the case being presented to a grand jury. It “can only be explained by the fact that my client is a black police officer.”
