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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.
The problem with this whole debate, is assuming making a system that is secure is beyond the means of mortal men. And will need a big organization to make such a system.
The truth is. If Apple are shown to be insecure, the bad guys will not use apple, they may make their own OS, which doesn't have the back doors. It may not be a fancy but secure for what is needed.
So Apple is loosing business, and the bad guys are still going under the radar.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
When has this, or the previous, administration really cared about what the law says when the law disagrees with what the administration wants to accomplish?
"Barack Obama has a fine legal mind."
To be blunt, this is unsubstantiated. For someone who has as many degrees and has held as many academic positions as Obama has, his scholarly writings are strangely absent.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I know how much you ACs love to hate on the president, but at least get your facts straight. The last time a president had as few executive orders per year (over the term of his presidency) as Obama was when Grover Cleveland was president. So if you're going to bitch and moan about Obama exercising his presidential authority, remember that presidents like Reagan did a lot more "ram rodding their way down everyone's throats" than Obama has (to the tune of 50% more).
source: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu...
...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.
So is it Obama or EO's that you have a problem with? Because in recent history the high scores currently are:
Ronnie 381
Bill 364
George W 291
Barack 224 (with 1 year to go)
George H 166
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
The default status is that the people have the right to do, or not to do, anything. The government has no rights, except as stated in the Constitution.
Therefore, passing a law preventing the government from doing something is oxymoronic. The government cannot force Apple to do anything - no legislation required. Any attempt to compel Apple must pass constitutional muster.
I get annoyed when the media reports something like "a law to legalize marijuana", or "a law to legalize abortion", or " a law to legalize gun ownership." The correct framing is "a law prohibiting...has been repealed/found unconstitutional."
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
You haven't been reading the news. The FBI says that it wants certain security measures removed from one particular phone. It wants Apple to write a modified version of iOS to be used only by the FBI in a secured environment to flash the iOS of this one phone, so the FBI can brute force the password (and use software to assist) without risking the encryption key being destroyed (there is a possibility that a feature on the phone is turned on that would disable unlocking of the phone altogether after 10 wrong guesses (though there are methods around this as well, but still it would be slow)).
That is what the DOJ said anyway. But then other district attorneys said that they are in the same situation with something like 112 other iPhones. They said this to support the DOJ's need for the modified software, but obviously it damaged the government's argument that this is a one time thing.
This is very different from Apple's earlier assistance to the government because this is the first time the DOJ has demanded that Apple actually create a modified, inherently less secure version of iOS. Apple would have to actually pay engineers to write code to create a version of iOS that must, must, must not ever be released to the public. It would have to be used only in a contained environment on Apple's campus not connected to the outside world--which Apple would have to build just for this purpose. Otherwise it would have to rely on the government to not accidentally release the modified iOS to bad actors.
The government is trying to use something called the "All Writs Act" to say that it can basically force anyone to do anything.
Please take your so-called facts elsewhere. They have no place on a politics thread.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I'm not jumping into the middle of this fight (I'm not educated enough on the subject) but I will say that there is nothing inherently wrong with an executive order. Many laws that congress writes delegate various powers to the executive--this is why we have a Code of Federal Regulations to go along with US code (USC enables the executive branch to do something, and the CFR is the details of that something... at least in theory). An executive order is a reasonable way for the President (the head of the executive branch) to direct HOW the executive branch does something. The problem arises when executive orders purport to enable or forbid something the executive branch has no power to enable or forbid.
Simply counting how many executive orders a president issues is meaningless in a vacuum. One has to actually ANALYZE those orders to determine if "screw the laws and precedents" is accurate with regard to a particular president.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
You packed a lot of wrong into such a small post.
Unfortunately Apple isn't a 'communications carrier'.
The CALEA subchapter in question that prohibits the feds from mandating a particular design explicitly mentions manufacturers (quoting the relevant bit: "This subchapter does not authorize any law enforcement agency [...] to require any specific design of equipment, facilities, services, features, or system configurations to be adopted by [...] any manufacturer of telecommunications equipment [...]"), which would refer to Apple in this case, since cell phones are considered telecommunications devices. Neither the summary nor the article mention anything about CALEA being limited to just carriers, nor is that the case, since it applies to manufacturers, support service providers, and communications service providers, among others, so I have no clue where you got the incorrect notion that it only applied to carriers.
If this was a viable out then Apple would have used it. It isn't.
You are talking out of your ass, since this is exactly the line of argumentation Apple has been using in its briefs for the last several weeks. Here's Apple's latest brief, where they explicitly mention CALEA and its relevance to applying the All Writs Act. Where do you think this law professor got the idea? It's been the core of Apple's argument ever since their initial appeal of the order in February, since it undermines the very foundation on which the FBI is basing its demand. There have been multiple discussions here at Slashdot over this exact topic in the last few weeks alone. Apple has been arguing that the All Writs Act, which the FBI is using in order to conscript Apple's assistance, is inapplicable in situations where Congress has passed laws that provide more specificity. 200 years of legal precedent agree with that understanding. And, contrary to your assertions, CALEA clearly provides a higher degree of specificity that's directly applicable in this case, since it explicitly states that law enforcement cannot make these sorts of demands of manufacturers.
How your comment got +5 Insightful when it is such utter and complete rubbish is beyond me.
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.
There are 11 million illegal immigrants in the US. What exactly is your plan to deport them? To round them up? Where are you going to house and feed them while you do? Are you going to build some sort of colossal prison-city?
It's all very well to talk about deportation, but it's not a practical idea at this point, and to even attempt to do so would be both ruinously expensive and necessitate the vast expansion of police numbers and powers. We would destroy our society in this vain and foolhardy attempt.
For my part, I have been an illegal immigrant before, staying on a tourist visa in Central America for several years*. I would still be there today, building a better life for myself, if I could have managed it. I was far from the only gringo there trying to do so. I can say from personal experience that it takes an exceptional kind of person to pack up and leave their entire family and try to settle in a new country, and many American families are also proud to attest to this. As far as I can tell, there is no economic or social argument to be made against the free flow of labor other than simple racism. I see no reason why this latest group of immigrants should not be granted the same opportunities our ancestors were. I believe that it is a moral imperative to do so, as well as patriotic. And not to belabor the point, but there really isn't an alternative: a wall might keep some people out, but the immigrants in the country now are here to stay.
* My reasons were complicated and not worth getting into.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.