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The Law Is Clear: the FBI Cannot Make Apple Rewrite Its OS (backchannel.com)
An anonymous reader cites a post by Susan Crawford, Harvard Law Professor and former Obama Special Assistant: From her column at Backchannel, "Barack Obama has a fine legal mind. But he may not have been using it when he talked about encryption last week. [...] The problem for the president is that when it comes to the specific battle going on right now between Apple and the FBI, the law is clear: twenty years ago, Congress passed a statute, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) that does not allow the government to tell manufacturers how to design or configure a phone or software used by that phone -- including security software used by that phone.
...can do what ever the hell he pleases. It isn't the first time he basically said screw the laws and precedents and tried to ram rod his way down everyone's throats.
There is a war on encryption right now, and frankly I don't think most politicians, and probably most of the senior folk at the FBI, even really know what it is. I'm sure in their view it's just some evil blackbox designed to keep them out, and all they need to do is bludgeon anyone implementing encryption systems with laws, the courts and a lot of bluster about how people like Apple are helping pedophiles, terrorists and organized crime.
Somewhere in the bowels of the various intelligence and security services there are people who are perfectly well aware that encryption is simply a mathematical discipline, that trying to outlaw types of encryption is the equivalent of trying to outlaw nuclear fusion or prime numbers, but what they're hoping is that a "compromise" will be made giving them back doors.
What worries me in the long run isn't the growing war between the technology giants and governments, but when they turn their attention to other projects like OpenSSL, OpenSSH, OpenVPN and other open source and freely available encryption systems. If the bad guys are as smart as they seem to assert (and there's no reason to think that at least some are), then they're just going to switch to roll your own solutions, use burner phones for any instant communication. Then are we going to see the project leads for these software packages being summoned to Congress or to Parliament, and basically accused of protecting bad people? Or will agencies like the FBI finally blink?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I hate this. Not least of which is the lack of scalability. If one's are dots, tens are boxes, and hundreds are cubes, what are thousands? Ten thousands? Millions? When an elementary school kid needs to draw a seven-dimension-hyper-cube to solve his homework, it's a sign that we've needlessly over-complicated things.
My third grader has nightly crying sessions over his math homework. He struggles with basic concepts like multiplication and division. My seventh grader, though, got his beginning math done before Common Core took over and loves math. My wife and I are very active opposing Common Core and high stakes testing. My kids opt out of all of the big standardized tests, Some may claim we're teaching them "if something's hard don't do it," but I say we're teaching them "if someone tells you to do X and you think the reasons for X are horribly wrong, then don't do X just because an authority told you to do so."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Party A: The Party B administration goes too far when doing X!
Party A (post-election): Our Party A administration is perfectly justified in doing X and Y!
Party B: The Party A administration goes too far when doing X and Y!
Party B (post-election): Our Party B administration is perfectly justified in doing X and Y and Z!
{repeat ad infinitum}
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.