The head of the UN commission on human rights has come out in support of Apple for the very same reason many of us are saying, that it could lead to all kinds of abuses, that by creating the kind of back door the FBI wants (no, folks, it isn’t just one phone, the FBI leader was basically outright lying about that, not a big surprise) it would open up phones to every dictatorship out there or those trying to suppress free speech. There are elements in this country who also have been looking for ways to reverse the rights of the accused that have happened in the past 50 years or so, Miranda, Gideon, rules on reasonable searches and so forth, and with something like this it would give law enforcement a further way around the rules. In this case, the FBI got a court order, but a tool like this could be used in ways that would violate the rules out there. With a tool like this, a cop could break a phone without a court order, see there was criminal activity, then either get or manufacture evidence that could be used in court…and claim “Oh, we had an anonymous source”. You can say that isn’t true, but cop forces routinely were asking for the metadata the NSA was pulling off of intercepts of phones and the internet, with the purpose of looking for signs of criminal activity, and Dick Cheney and some of the other pushers for the Patriot act wanted it that if information of criminal activity other than terrorism came up from one of the warrantles wiretaps, that it be allowed to be used in court, so I am not talking hypothetically here.
How lovely.
Reposting the link,
Is the Congress justing sitting and not doing anything about it?
@Iglooo Not to get political, but Congress seems to be more concerned with repealing the ACA. Also note the timing: these changes were put into effect when Congress - and the general populace - are occupied with the Presidential Elections. I remember the people who speculated that this would happen back in 2012 were discredited as “conspiracy theorists” and “nut jobs”. Well, so much for that now.
Back to topic… just have to wonder if a few NSA folks might have previously worked for Apple and have a few tricks up their sleeves that we will not know about…
Just musing as i adjust to the time difference and drink my morning cup of coffee…
I guess what that means is both parties are in agreement on this issue. No longer Dem vs Repub, more like people vs government, whether dem or repub. If someone could put that on the presidential debate, we could take advantage of the election, too.
It isn’t political, while the GOP in general have been pushing for ‘law and order’, that often means trying to roll back rights that have been given those accused, the Democrats are just as bad, Obama to me has been especially disappointing, pushing the whole “you don’t know what is out there” crap, and then, too, supporting the NSA data gathering. I don’t know how someone who is supposedly a constitutional scholar can forget why the constitution was written, but warrantless wiretaps and allowing cops to fish for ‘crimes’ like that is why we have warrants in the first place.
So where are all the people who told me I was lying when the Snowden revelations came out, that the data was only being used to look for terrorism, that the government would never do that, that the Patriot Act was only about terrorism, etc?
The Patriot Act should have never been enacted. Asides from where you stand politically, decisions made in panic are rarely good ones. And this one was made in the post 9/11 frenzy that gripped the U.S. We tell students and parents on this very site to not be hasty in action when a teacher unfairly marks a student, or when a student encounters a problem on campus. I don’t see why the same couldn’t have applied when people voted for the passing of the Act.
This is basically the FBI rendering the 4th Amendment ineffective. What a sad day for democracy.
I came across an article this morning. I think we all know.
Which is what this boils to. The government just wants to make sure they can do this whenever, in any case, and just need to set legal precedent.
It tickles me that the world derides N.Korea and China for their spying on people in their countries, while the US does the exact same thing. Kinda makes it hard to hold a higher moral ground, for the American Government at least.
John Oliver weighs in (warning: language):
^Great clip! Thank you for sharing.
Interesting anology,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/simona-grossi/the-applefbi-case-freedom_b_9459018.html?
@igloo:
That is very relevent, the Pentagon Papers case was about the government trying to suppress publication of a study, claiming ‘national security’ was at stake…and what it turned out to be, as many such cases do, was that the document in question was politically embarrassing, that it found that many of the justifications for the war were known to be false even when they were routinely used to justify the war (or so I seem to recall).
The analogy holds in that if the government was allowed to suppress the Pentagon papers, it could allow them to suppress almost anything and claim special privilege.
With the Apple case, it is using the justification of terrorism or other need to force companies to give them backdoors, it is the same kind of justification for suppressing information, “national security”. The problem becomes if you give them this ability, that they then can go into court and claim “oh, this is the same thing as the San Bernandino case”, and have the court use that as precedent. Like anything else, it comes down to who is watching the watchers, and one thing history has shown is assuming good intent or good will is the road to overreaching. Like with the NSA data, that is supposed to be used only to look for immediate threats of terrorism, but now apparently is being given to law enforcement to use in a gigantic fishing expedition, what history shows is once the walls get breached, it is the old story that give them an inch, they will take a mile. A lot of people put their head in the sand about this, either they weren’t around when the Church committee hearings happened, or when the revelations about the FBI under Hoover, or they somehow think what Hoover and the CIA did was good for the country, but what it showed is how national security turned into suppressing dissent.
@musicprnt That’s exactly what I said somewhere upthread. I completely agree with everything you said.
The fact that the NSA has virtually unlimited access to everybody - as bad as it is - is one thing. In the hands of the FBI, however, the information is exponentially more damaging. We are looking at political sabotage, extortion and coercion in degrees unprecedented by anything before. If this does indeed pass, the corruption of the Hoover era will seem like child’s play in comparison.
Is anybody fighting this in court (the sharing of NSA data with local law enforcement, that is)? Is it even constitutional?
@inifinityman: The original Patriot Act, if I recall correctly, had provisions that stated that the wireless wiretaps and the like could only be used in fighting terrorism, that they were not legal beyond that narrow scope. I don’t know if the NSA decided on their own to turn over the data, or if Congress modified the Patriot act, but someone should be screaming about this from all quarters. The right wing politicians screaming about the IRS targeting conservative groups, the liberals upset about the reign of secrecy in government, they all should be screaming about this. My wife couldn’t believe how upset I am about it, she is kind of like saying ‘if they use this to go after drug trafficers, why is that a bad thing?", it is hard to explain that the same kind of tactics have been used by everyone from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union to China, allowing total access to people’s lives "for their safety’, when in reality it often comes down to political control.
What is worse is law enforcement knows what they are doing is broad based fishing, it is why they have all these methods of constructing “parallel explanations” to get around that the original source of the information was tainted (under the fruit of the poisoned tree reasoning, any evidence that was found because of an illegal search is tainted as well). My wife pointed out that defendents routinely get off on minor technicalities, like for example, an impound lot where they searched the car and found drugs was technically no longer licensed as an official lot, because the permit expired a day before, and they guy walks…that is where a judge is supposed to rule and where it was a minor technicality is supposed to take that into account, this is not minor. Among other things, law enforcement quite frankly are lazy, and if they can get things without having to do good old fashioned detective work and intelligence gathering, they will take it.
This just keeps getting better:
http://www.idownloadblog.com/2016/03/14/dos-threats-seize-ios/
So now the government is showing its true colors. A thinly veiled threat in order to twist Apple’s arm into complying.
To be honest, I’m even more frustrated with the general public. Where’s the outrage? Don’t people realize that the Stasi would have killed for the sort of power the FBI is after?
I lost some of my respect for the President today, after he said the iPhone encryption would be like “everyone carrying a Swiss Bank in their pocket”. I’m sorry but this is bad how? Why would I want total strangers (and that’s what FBI agents are to most of us, strangers) to be entitled to peruse my financial information at will? Or any information not pertaining to a case at hand?
This is setting up to be worse than any abuse we’ve seen under the Patriot Act. I have feeling that if it does come to pass and the NSA shares data with FBI and local LE (God forbid) crime rates won’t decrease, but incarcerations would (especially of people of color).
We are all becoming obedient sheep. 
Usually, I’m on side of public safety but in this case, privacy wins because breaking into that phone isn’t going to give much information but it can give agencies access to our data and eventually it would end up in hands of hackers and scammers. By the way, I wouldn’t trust President Trump with my bank password any more than I would trust him with nuclear codes.
FBI may have found a way to access the phone without any assistance from Apple:
http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/21/technology/doj-apple-hearing/index.html