rcfa

ronn said:

Law Enforcement (sic) often applies the "If you have nothing to hide..." mentality when it comes to citizens' complaints about police snooping. Yet they are strident in their defense of secrecy when it comes to issues like GrayKey and similar police state tools. They can't have it both ways.

Exactly! If the government has nothing to hide, FOIA requests should be quick, complete, and largely unredacted. In reality, the opposite is the case.
Even public safety information is routinely hidden from people who rely on it for their own safety.
Yet they expect people to essentially walk through life naked and transparent.

In reality, everything is need to know only, as every bit of information can be weaponized and turned into compromat in the hands of a well trained manipulator.

The older I get, and the more governmental abuse of power I witness, the more I agree with the idea that government should be small enough to drown in a bathtub.

They should be concerned with defending the borders, keeping streets, sewer and water running, preventing the poisoning of the environment, and punishing violent crime, theft and fraud. And most everything else is none of their business, in particular any form of potential self-harm.

Until they have a different battery chemistry, BEVs are an environmental disaster; FCEVs or combustion engines running on CO2-negative synthetic fuels, or even natural gas (if one takes the CO2 footprint of manufacturing into account), are a much better solution.
Unfortnately, like Lemmings, they follow all a few pseudo-green apostles, who decided without doing the math, or considering anything other than CO2, that Li-Ion battery based electric mobility is “the future”. 

applesauce007 said:

It is relatively easy to conclusively identify pedophile content than to identify terrorist content.
If Apple could detect terrorist content conclusively, I am sure they would be off of iCloud as well.

Wanting to keep identifiably illegal content off of a storage service is the right thing to do.
I hope other storage services follow suit.

This is a ridiculous thing to say, and incredibly naive.

In China having pictures of the Dalai Lama or even Winnie the Pooh on your phone can get you in trouble. One is considered an enemy of the state for fighting non-violently for an autonomous Tibet and religious freedom for Tibetan Buddhism, the other is used to mock the “Dear Leader“ Xi Jinping.
In Russia having pictures of Navalni, a prominent critic, may draw the attention of the FSB or its internal equivalent.

The world isn’t cuddly, there are no safe spaces, once privacy is eroded.

Who gives a damn about the US Constitution?

First, the US government keeps twisting and reinterpreting what it means, and…

second, and most importantly, the world doesn’t end at the US border, despite the incredible myopic world view of some people.

Russia, China, etc. are in no way bound by the US constitution, and they may simply give Apple the choice between complying with new laws or exiting their lucrative markets.

Just the ridiculousness of arguing with the US constitution in the context of a global corporation … unbelievable…

Great way to up the budget for BlackOps and counter the erosion of trust in the dollar in one fell swoop…
…there are agencies with the means and the motivation to do something like that outside what’s traditionally considered criminal circles.