CMA102DL

tpkatsa said:

This is a federal terrorism investigation. The privacy issue is moot because the ONE phone in question belonged to a terrorist who is now dead. Apple needs to be very careful with this. Being perceived to be on the wrong side of an FBI investigation of a terrorist act where 14 people were murdered can't be good for Apple's image. There are times to stick up for privacy rights, such as when the government tries to do things without a warrant, or otherwise tries to circumvent the process, but not when the government has a court order from a federal judge for assistance with a dead terrorist's phone. Apple needs to do the right thing here and help the feds get any and all information that will help us understand what led to the murder of 14 people - anything less is a disgrace and an affront to those who perished in the attack.

Apple will obey a legitimate court order, but first, it will try to make it clear that the US Govt should not compromise encryption. What is at stake is far more than privacy. Do you honestly think that there is anything valuable to the case in the phone? If you ask the NSA, they say that the way they get around encryption is by gathering metadata. Metadata, which the FBI has access as of today. Or is the FBI completely incompetent and needs to get metadata from the phone directly? First, the CTD completely missed detection of these terrorists and now the FBI is using the case as a pretext to get additional power.

Apple is in a tough place. The Govt. is not going to lose this one. They will use every tactic of coercion they are known for including slander, misrepresentation, intimidation, lying, etc. Take Joe Nacchio, the ex Qwest executive who refused to turn over mass customer data when requested to do so in violation of the 4th Amendment. The government found a way to frame him for insider trading (of course, Joe was not guilty for insider trading) and he went to prison for 6 years. Take Yahoo. They refused the secret court order to turn over information to the NSA and were fined $250K a day. And this was the NSA. The NSA pales in comparison to the FBI. The FBI has pure coercive government power and they are known for playing dirty. The government will do anything to put away Tim and get someone else that will compromise. Tim really rubbed Obama the wrong way when he went against the administration. This issue is greater than encryption. This is personal. If the government can't succeed at removing Tim, then it will do everything it can to destroy Apple. Under Obama, civil liberties have been violated further. It is a fact. All those civil liberty promises Obama made during his run for the Presidency, he kept none. But encryption is beyond civil liberties. This is a safety issue  and the Obama administration wants to compromise data security for everyone. There you have it. The US Govt has your best interests in mind...

mrich said:

We wouldn't be having this conversation if a) such encryption had existed on 9/11 and b) on 9/12 the FBI had asked Apple to let it into any suspect phones. Steve Jobs or Tim Cook would have opened them up with their tongues, because the enormity of the crime demanded it. They would have looked like co-conspirators with mass murderers in the eyes of the whole world if they had made then the same argument Cook et al. are making now. Such noble half-baked and immature statements as the ones made above are only possible because merely 16 persons were murdered in San Bernardino. Yes, the hard truth about abstract moral principles is that they have to be put into action in the real world in the context of real human lives, and that changes the weight and heft of the arguments. If it had been 3,000 people who had been murdered in California rather than a *mere* 16, we wouldn't be hearing these arguments. So that begs the question: Just how many mass murder victims is Apple willing to tolerate? How many are we the public willing to tolerate before we insist that Apple co-operate in keeping us safe? Or is the difference in the nature of the weapons used? Are assault rifle murders acceptable, while murders caused by airplanes are not? How about a poison gas attack, or a dirty bomb? Where is the line between an acceptable number of murders and an intolerable number?

Fact is that governments will always use a tragic events to gain more power. But we have the Constitution and should avoid responding based on emotions. The DOJ should not be able to force Apple to do anything against their own moral will, especially since it could harm others. And if we treat code writing as speech, the government cannot force you to communicate anything you are not willing to communicate. On a side note, If by now the FBI cannot connect dots from previous phone data backup, phone call metadata, message metadata, geopositional data, and social media data, then we need to worry that our CTD is either inept or they are collecting so much information that they cannot process it all. Not only the CTD failed at stopping the initial attack, they are now using this tragedy and the victims to justify more judicial overreach. It is a fact that the FBI and our intelligence agencies are collecting far more information nowadays than previously in history. Apple is doing right by pushing back and standing firm.

SpamSandwich said:

Andrew_M said:

The fact of the matter is that government has always required some type of public safety designs of private property. For example, buildings would be more secure against burglars if there were no windows. But building codes protect the greater public interest by requiring windows, fire escapes, etc. Requiring a means to access data by court order is not that much different. It’s in the public interest and hardly an intrusion for 99.999% of the population. 

I hope you take a moment to realize that the majority of garbage that floats out of Washington, for many decades now, is utterly unconstitutional. The people who crafted our Constitution and Bill of Rights would be horrified at what has become of this country and they would wonder why the people had not thrown everyone in government out on their ears or had them imprisoned for treason.

You will find a lot of people in government that wished that there were no US Constitution. They feel like their hands are tied from doing what they see is "right". In an environment of secrecy and lack of oversight, the Constitution is often perverted through corrupt lawyers. This is why the 215 program from the NSA came under fire few years ago after the Snowden leaks. Yet this and other questionable programs were approved by the FISA secret court and 100% legal...James Comey thinks that the law should adapt to technological changes. I do not think so. It is like saying that the US Constitution should undergo an update every 10 years because of technological changes.

James Clapper (DNI): “A lot of people find this surprising in our post-9/11 world but in 2013 ‘cyber’ bumped ‘terrorism’ out of the top spot on our list of national threats,” he said. “And cyber has led our report every year since then.”

http://www.federaltimes.com/story/government/cybersecurity/2016/02/04/cyber-bigger-threat-terrorism/79816482/

Michael Hayden (ex-NSA chief): “Jim Clapper, Director of National Intelligence — for the last three years, has said the primary threat to the United States is cyber. The DNI says the primary thing that keeps him awake at night is cyber threat. Why would you weaken your cyber defense potentially, even if it were a good idea for these other problems over here. And so I’m broadly with Tim Cook and Apple.”

http://dailycaller.com/2016/02/25/former-nsa-chief-i-am-broadly-with-apple/

President Obama: “America’s economic prosperity, national security, and our individual liberties depend on our commitment to securing cyberspace and maintaining an open, interoperable, secure, and reliable Internet. Our critical infrastructure continues to be at risk from threats in cyberspace, and our economy is harmed by the theft of our intellectual property.”

https://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/foreign-policy/cybersecurity

The biggest threat to National Security is Cyber, not terror (ISIS, Al Qaeda, etc) and unbreakable encryption is the only tool we have to defend from it. Obama's administration wants to punch a hole in the safety net of encryption.