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.

Comments

Re:Dream on

[Jason Levine]

The "Common Core" addition method of dashes, boxes, and bigger boxes takes 100 times longer to do than simple addition, but simple addition will get a kid marked WRONG and the school threatening the parents with legal action if they interfere with the Government mandated system.

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."