While I support Apple's stance on this issue, it really doesn't apply in the California case. Authorities already had access to the phone from the start. Local authorities inadvertently reset the password and do not know what it is. The FBI is requesting help to reset the password that the authorities had put on the phone, not the shooters. As such, why would Apple not help?
All of that said, the FBI is also wrong. While it is one thing to request help with this particular phone. Trying to force Apple to write/enable a back door that they (FBI) could use without Apple's intervention is unconscionable. Apple is correct to fight that request.
I agree people purchased them for the high mpg. To remedy the issue with the emission standards, they will no longer have that high mpg. VW can't buy them back at fair market value because the value has plummeted because of this. VW sold a very expensive consumer product that was intentionally mislabeled and deceptive. Other companies in a similar situation have had to issue full refunds. How old the vehicle is shouldn't matter. If you are caught cheating, you need to make the consumer whole again. Whether it is a full refund or a new vehicle, doesn't matter. Either will work and there is actually precedent for it.
The government is offering this instead of a fine. What do you think happens if VW says "No"? Its executives are hauled off to jail? VW is banned in the US?
No. What happens is the original penalties apply.
This is the equivalent of the police telling a serial shoplifter they have two options: A trial and likely jail sentence, or they can go on a community service program cleaning up the roads in front of the businesses they damaged.
It is entirely fine, proper, and in the public interest, for the government to offer an offender the option of doing something that would benefit the community at large as an alternative to a punishment that wouldn't change a thing.
That would be fine if they were caught shoplifting. However, they falsified government records. They, perjured themselves and in terms of monetary damage, it falls under grand theft. Would a prosecutor (the police don't get the choice), really let such a person off with community service.
What VW did is equivalent to what Bernie Madoff did. Both bilked the public of millions of dollars and both falsified government records. Why not let him off and for his punishment, he has to sell investments? That is the equivalent of this so called punishment.
How DOES this let VW and its shareholders off the hook? Please explain. Seems like taking choice away and saying "do this or suffer" isn't letting them off the hoook.
VW was already planning on selling electric vehicles. So, in effect, their "punishment" is to do what they were already going to do.
Virtually all "free trade" agreements have SCREWED the average American worker for the benefit of large companies. That's enough for me to hate the TPP.
That is because free trade agreements are not meant to protect the average American worker. They are, however, meant to benefit the large corporations.
Good luck finding a jury that will send someone to jail when no harm has been done. Now everyone, please bone up on jury nullification.
Do civil suits have juries? Usually, they are just judges listening to arguments and if the law specifies the punishment, the judge's role is merely one of making sure proper procedure is followed versus determining a just settlement.
Then make it a choice for them: "We can either fine you a bazillion dollars, which, based on your actions, you absolutely deserve, or you can help the country as a whole by doing these things, which will probably end up costing you less in the long run and maybe, just maybe, helping you regain the trust of the people you screwed." Then, they get to make the choice.
How does this "settlement" help the people who were defrauded by VW when they purchased these vehicles? How does this settlement change corporate behavior given that VW was already going to produce electric cars? How does this settlement do anything other than let VW and its shareholders off the hook?
"Telling VW they must provide charging stations for cars they don't want to make in the first place is just wrong."...so is rigging emission tests and further harming the environment....
Less you forget, Government in America is supposed to be an expression of the will of The People. Being one of The People, I support this.
Unfortunately, since the SCOTUS determined that corporations are people, too. You aren't one of the people that government listens to. As for this solution, how does it remedy those who purchased a product that had false advertising and will, once fixed, be nowhere near being able to achieve the mileage they were promised. Shouldn't those people receive some justice?
I'm good with VW paying the fine, just as I had to do when I broke the speeding & stop light laws.
I think the government should either have them pay the fine or build infrastructure in the USA. Anything else sounds like a double fine. Of course VW could turn this to their advantage and into a win - making me think of how the record companies instance on DRM helped make iTunes a dominant player in the downloadable music market (maybe this is not the right analogy, but this is the thought that pops into my mind).
A correct remedy for violating the emission standards would be a fine. But this is more than violating emissions. People purchased these vehicles because of the supposedly clean nature of the vehicle along with the high mpg. Of course bringing the cars in line with the emissions will kill the mpg. VW new this was the case and as such this is fraud. They should be required to refund the purchase price of the vehicles to those who purchased them for breach of contract and intent to defraud. That would be in addition to the fine charged by the government for violating emission standards.
Put differently, VW intentionally misrepresented the product they were selling to the public. This, by definition, was a scam and they should be held accountable and make whole the people they scammed.
Right and maybe if you or I break the law we can just get to go on as nothing has happened. This solution only rewards them by having them do what they were going to do in the first place.
Here is a novel idea, have them fix the vehicles at their cost and then fine them to the maximum allowed by law and use the proceeds to build charging stations.
This proposed settlement is a bit like saying if you are a utility caught violating clean air laws, it's okay, for your punishment, go produce clean energy.
There is nothing positive about this settlement unless you are VW.
That is assuming that the excess isn't used for other purposes, say, research, infrastructure, military, new power sources, space, or whatever. There are other alternatives besides wealth redistribution.
The purpose of a progressive tax code is redistribution, not fairness.
There is nothing inherent in progressive tax code that leads to redistribution. That is on the spending side of government, not the taxation side. Social programs are not part of the tax code, but instead, how a government uses the funds raised. If the US had a flat tax and still had welfare programs, would people argue that the only purpose of a flat tax is redistribution? No, of course not.
Taxation and how the funds are used are two totally separate issues.
Like insurance, shouldn't you pay more for the protection of your property if you have more property to protect? As such, shouldn't the wealthy be paying a larger share of their income to taxes to protect their larger share of the benefit of government protection?
Your argument doesn't make sense. Of course the rich should pay more in taxes. But should they pay a higher percentage? Your "insurance" analogy does not support that. If I insure twice as much value, I pay twice as much, not three times as much.
Progressive taxation cannot be justified in terms of paying for services. It can only be justified if you believe that government should be an instrument of social justice.
I'm not saying they should pay a higher percentage, but the reality is, according to the OMB the top 10% pay the lowest percentage of total income as taxes, while the lowest 20% pay the highest percentage of total income as taxes.
As for insurance, if you buy a car that cost three times as much as I do, you would expect to pay three times the insurance, assume the other factors being the same. And yet, with taxes, at least in the US, it does not work that way. Again, according to the government's own numbers, the more you earn, the percentage paid in taxes decreases. You often hear quoted that the top 10% pay 50% of the taxes and while that is true, that is talking about in dollars paid, not as a percentage of income. Since the OP was about the cumulative tax burden of local, state and federal, including sales taxes, the more you have, the less percentage of it you pay.
As for the government being an instrument of social justice or not, that has nothing to do with it. The US had it's best economic growth at the same time it had its highest income tax rates. What determines economic growth is the purchasing power of the middle class, not the poor or the wealthy. However, since the 1980s, the middle class has received the heaviest tax burden (as a percentage of income) and has dwindled. Contrast that with, say, Germany that has a strong middle class and a high tax burden. They have a robust economy, even with many social programs beyond what the US has.
Social spending isn't the drain, it is the accumulation of wealth by the very top few percentages that drains the economy. Money in the hands of the lower and middle classes is used predominately to purchase direct goods and services, therefore stimulating supply and demand. Everybody wins. However, in the hands of the wealthy, it tends to accumulate which means it is actually removed from the economy. In this way, it has the same effect as government borrowing and actually slows the economy.
If one million people go out and purchase a new refrigerator, that will create more jobs than one person buying a million dollar boat. In addition the wages paid for those jobs will further stimulate the purchase of goods and services upto seven times the original dollar amount.
Remember, prior to the 1980s, the United States had a progressive tax system and had it's greatest economic growth period. Since then, when the tax system was flattened, at the expense of the middle and lower classes, growth, outside of speculative ventures, has declined.
When Tax rates (combined all government taxes/fees) exceeds 50%, I would suggest to you that we have indentured servitude. Just saying
The effective tax rate of all taxes and fees is well below 50%, at least in the US. On the federal level, it is less than 30%, including Social Security/Medicare. Yes, there are local sales and income taxes, but, then, most people like to have police and fire protection, ambulance services, highways, etc.
In its simplest form, government is funded by taxes with the purpose of the government to be for the protection of people and property. If you take the high road and say one human live is as valuable as another, then the portion of taxes used to protect people is equally distributed. What is left, is the protection of property. Like insurance, shouldn't you pay more for the protection of your property if you have more property to protect? As such, shouldn't the wealthy be paying a larger share of their income to taxes to protect their larger share of the benefit of government protection?
Put two and two together -- Apple puts out an iOS update just after a court order to put a backdoor into their phones. A court order that legal experts say is valid and Apple will be found in contempt if they fail to comply.
I call BullSh*t. For this to be true, then the people involved would have to already been suspects to be monitored. For this to be true, then the authorities would have known an attack was coming, just not when -- why didn't they warn anybody? For this to be true, then they failed with the boots on the ground that infiltrate these groups.
I have no doubt that the encryption can make things more difficult, but to say it would have been prevented without encryption is just false. It's as if nobody prior to the modern day ever used code words for any activity? This is a just a propaganda piece to try and convince the public that encryption is bad. The piece they fail to mention, is your data is your personal IP. If it is okay for Sony to protect their IP, if it is okay for Microsoft to protect their IP, why does the government have a problem with individuals interested in protecting their IP?
Wouldn't this just be an example of a multi-question survey? Such systems have existed for decades. Even Compuserve had a version of it. How would voting for the Top American Singer be any different than voting for a product to list on Massdrop?
Except all the people like you that appear to have no concept of network security. The DoD is quite capable of preventing these machines from talking to anything that is not explicitly approved.
If Microsoft can't talk to these machines remotely why are you terrified? My guess is also that the machines that matter have heavy security while the ones for unclassified email are probably not all that different from what we see in most offices. I had no trouble configuring Palo Alto or Sonicwall devices to stop all Microsoft traffic and I only dedicated half of a day to it. SCCM is the only server at the location that is allowed to talk to Microsoft so it can get updates which are then distributed on-schedule. This is not hard to do especially when you're talking about managing a large number of computers.
If you are going to use a computer with Windows 10 but prevent it from communicating with the outside world, doesn't that defeat the purpose of the automatically updating tile interface? What advantage would Windows 10 give a restricted user that Windows 7 would not? I agree it's not hard to lock down a network. It's just why use an interface specifically designed for being on an open network if that is what you are going to do?
Answer: the court order is for Apple to write such a backdoor program.
Yes, I know, but such a program won't work retroactively to unencrypt the already encrypted data because Apple doesn't have the key. It would only work going forward. As such, the government's appeal to the courts is bogus. The back door still won't get them the unencrypted data.
Put differently, the government already has the data from the phone in question. To access the data in unencrypted form, there is nothing that Apple can do that they, themselves cannot do. If Apple acquiesced, then for future cases of terrorism where an iphone might have been involved, then the data might be accessible if the user didn't take some further measure to protect it. There are a lot of "mights" in that scenario. Of course, none of it would apply to the CA attackers because the backdoor, as far as we are being told, is not in existence.
Nine quadrillion, nine hundred trillion combinations...if I worked that web calculator correctly.
Perhaps they should try 1,2,3,4.
As others have pointed out, there are only 10,000 combinations using a four digit numeric pin. Of course, with an iphone, you only get to try ten of them incorrectly before it wipes the phone.
I have a basic question. The phone in question is encrypted. How is Apple supposed to un-encrypt it without the key, which they state they do not have? Apple goes on to say, that for the future, they would have to create a back door program to do that which is an entirely different discussion. So, unless the backdoor already exists (and Apple wants to keep it secret), how can this "request" be fulfilled?
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While I support Apple's stance on this issue, it really doesn't apply in the California case. Authorities already had access to the phone from the start. Local authorities inadvertently reset the password and do not know what it is. The FBI is requesting help to reset the password that the authorities had put on the phone, not the shooters. As such, why would Apple not help?
All of that said, the FBI is also wrong. While it is one thing to request help with this particular phone. Trying to force Apple to write/enable a back door that they (FBI) could use without Apple's intervention is unconscionable. Apple is correct to fight that request.
I agree people purchased them for the high mpg. To remedy the issue with the emission standards, they will no longer have that high mpg. VW can't buy them back at fair market value because the value has plummeted because of this. VW sold a very expensive consumer product that was intentionally mislabeled and deceptive. Other companies in a similar situation have had to issue full refunds. How old the vehicle is shouldn't matter. If you are caught cheating, you need to make the consumer whole again. Whether it is a full refund or a new vehicle, doesn't matter. Either will work and there is actually precedent for it.
The government is offering this instead of a fine. What do you think happens if VW says "No"? Its executives are hauled off to jail? VW is banned in the US?
No. What happens is the original penalties apply.
This is the equivalent of the police telling a serial shoplifter they have two options: A trial and likely jail sentence, or they can go on a community service program cleaning up the roads in front of the businesses they damaged.
It is entirely fine, proper, and in the public interest, for the government to offer an offender the option of doing something that would benefit the community at large as an alternative to a punishment that wouldn't change a thing.
That would be fine if they were caught shoplifting. However, they falsified government records. They, perjured themselves and in terms of monetary damage, it falls under grand theft. Would a prosecutor (the police don't get the choice), really let such a person off with community service.
What VW did is equivalent to what Bernie Madoff did. Both bilked the public of millions of dollars and both falsified government records. Why not let him off and for his punishment, he has to sell investments? That is the equivalent of this so called punishment.
How DOES this let VW and its shareholders off the hook? Please explain. Seems like taking choice away and saying "do this or suffer" isn't letting them off the hoook.
VW was already planning on selling electric vehicles. So, in effect, their "punishment" is to do what they were already going to do.
Virtually all "free trade" agreements have SCREWED the average American worker for the benefit of large companies. That's enough for me to hate the TPP.
That is because free trade agreements are not meant to protect the average American worker. They are, however, meant to benefit the large corporations.
Good luck finding a jury that will send someone to jail when no harm has been done. Now everyone, please bone up on jury nullification.
Do civil suits have juries? Usually, they are just judges listening to arguments and if the law specifies the punishment, the judge's role is merely one of making sure proper procedure is followed versus determining a just settlement.
Then make it a choice for them: "We can either fine you a bazillion dollars, which, based on your actions, you absolutely deserve, or you can help the country as a whole by doing these things, which will probably end up costing you less in the long run and maybe, just maybe, helping you regain the trust of the people you screwed." Then, they get to make the choice.
How does this "settlement" help the people who were defrauded by VW when they purchased these vehicles? How does this settlement change corporate behavior given that VW was already going to produce electric cars? How does this settlement do anything other than let VW and its shareholders off the hook?
"Telling VW they must provide charging stations for cars they don't want to make in the first place is just wrong." ...so is rigging emission tests and further harming the environment....
Less you forget, Government in America is supposed to be an expression of the will of The People. Being one of The People, I support this.
Unfortunately, since the SCOTUS determined that corporations are people, too. You aren't one of the people that government listens to. As for this solution, how does it remedy those who purchased a product that had false advertising and will, once fixed, be nowhere near being able to achieve the mileage they were promised. Shouldn't those people receive some justice?
I'm good with VW paying the fine, just as I had to do when I broke the speeding & stop light laws.
I think the government should either have them pay the fine or build infrastructure in the USA. Anything else sounds like a double fine. Of course VW could turn this to their advantage and into a win - making me think of how the record companies instance on DRM helped make iTunes a dominant player in the downloadable music market (maybe this is not the right analogy, but this is the thought that pops into my mind).
A correct remedy for violating the emission standards would be a fine. But this is more than violating emissions. People purchased these vehicles because of the supposedly clean nature of the vehicle along with the high mpg. Of course bringing the cars in line with the emissions will kill the mpg. VW new this was the case and as such this is fraud. They should be required to refund the purchase price of the vehicles to those who purchased them for breach of contract and intent to defraud. That would be in addition to the fine charged by the government for violating emission standards.
Put differently, VW intentionally misrepresented the product they were selling to the public. This, by definition, was a scam and they should be held accountable and make whole the people they scammed.
When you break the law and get caught, the gov't gets to tell you a lot of things you can & can't do.
But rarely does the government tell you that for your punishment, to go produce a new product instead of paying a fine.
Right and maybe if you or I break the law we can just get to go on as nothing has happened. This solution only rewards them by having them do what they were going to do in the first place.
Here is a novel idea, have them fix the vehicles at their cost and then fine them to the maximum allowed by law and use the proceeds to build charging stations.
This proposed settlement is a bit like saying if you are a utility caught violating clean air laws, it's okay, for your punishment, go produce clean energy.
There is nothing positive about this settlement unless you are VW.
That is assuming that the excess isn't used for other purposes, say, research, infrastructure, military, new power sources, space, or whatever. There are other alternatives besides wealth redistribution.
The purpose of a progressive tax code is redistribution, not fairness.
There is nothing inherent in progressive tax code that leads to redistribution. That is on the spending side of government, not the taxation side. Social programs are not part of the tax code, but instead, how a government uses the funds raised. If the US had a flat tax and still had welfare programs, would people argue that the only purpose of a flat tax is redistribution? No, of course not.
Taxation and how the funds are used are two totally separate issues.
Like insurance, shouldn't you pay more for the protection of your property if you have more property to protect? As such, shouldn't the wealthy be paying a larger share of their income to taxes to protect their larger share of the benefit of government protection?
Your argument doesn't make sense. Of course the rich should pay more in taxes. But should they pay a higher percentage? Your "insurance" analogy does not support that. If I insure twice as much value, I pay twice as much, not three times as much.
Progressive taxation cannot be justified in terms of paying for services. It can only be justified if you believe that government should be an instrument of social justice.
I'm not saying they should pay a higher percentage, but the reality is, according to the OMB the top 10% pay the lowest percentage of total income as taxes, while the lowest 20% pay the highest percentage of total income as taxes.
As for insurance, if you buy a car that cost three times as much as I do, you would expect to pay three times the insurance, assume the other factors being the same. And yet, with taxes, at least in the US, it does not work that way. Again, according to the government's own numbers, the more you earn, the percentage paid in taxes decreases. You often hear quoted that the top 10% pay 50% of the taxes and while that is true, that is talking about in dollars paid, not as a percentage of income. Since the OP was about the cumulative tax burden of local, state and federal, including sales taxes, the more you have, the less percentage of it you pay.
As for the government being an instrument of social justice or not, that has nothing to do with it. The US had it's best economic growth at the same time it had its highest income tax rates. What determines economic growth is the purchasing power of the middle class, not the poor or the wealthy. However, since the 1980s, the middle class has received the heaviest tax burden (as a percentage of income) and has dwindled. Contrast that with, say, Germany that has a strong middle class and a high tax burden. They have a robust economy, even with many social programs beyond what the US has.
Social spending isn't the drain, it is the accumulation of wealth by the very top few percentages that drains the economy. Money in the hands of the lower and middle classes is used predominately to purchase direct goods and services, therefore stimulating supply and demand. Everybody wins. However, in the hands of the wealthy, it tends to accumulate which means it is actually removed from the economy. In this way, it has the same effect as government borrowing and actually slows the economy.
If one million people go out and purchase a new refrigerator, that will create more jobs than one person buying a million dollar boat. In addition the wages paid for those jobs will further stimulate the purchase of goods and services upto seven times the original dollar amount.
Remember, prior to the 1980s, the United States had a progressive tax system and had it's greatest economic growth period. Since then, when the tax system was flattened, at the expense of the middle and lower classes, growth, outside of speculative ventures, has declined.
When Tax rates (combined all government taxes/fees) exceeds 50%, I would suggest to you that we have indentured servitude. Just saying
The effective tax rate of all taxes and fees is well below 50%, at least in the US. On the federal level, it is less than 30%, including Social Security/Medicare. Yes, there are local sales and income taxes, but, then, most people like to have police and fire protection, ambulance services, highways, etc.
In its simplest form, government is funded by taxes with the purpose of the government to be for the protection of people and property. If you take the high road and say one human live is as valuable as another, then the portion of taxes used to protect people is equally distributed. What is left, is the protection of property. Like insurance, shouldn't you pay more for the protection of your property if you have more property to protect? As such, shouldn't the wealthy be paying a larger share of their income to taxes to protect their larger share of the benefit of government protection?
Are you just happy to be considered profound by other idiots? Because that is fucking stupid.
Why yes, yes, I am. :)
Put two and two together -- Apple puts out an iOS update just after a court order to put a backdoor into their phones. A court order that legal experts say is valid and Apple will be found in contempt if they fail to comply.
I call BullSh*t. For this to be true, then the people involved would have to already been suspects to be monitored. For this to be true, then the authorities would have known an attack was coming, just not when -- why didn't they warn anybody? For this to be true, then they failed with the boots on the ground that infiltrate these groups.
I have no doubt that the encryption can make things more difficult, but to say it would have been prevented without encryption is just false. It's as if nobody prior to the modern day ever used code words for any activity? This is a just a propaganda piece to try and convince the public that encryption is bad. The piece they fail to mention, is your data is your personal IP. If it is okay for Sony to protect their IP, if it is okay for Microsoft to protect their IP, why does the government have a problem with individuals interested in protecting their IP?
Wouldn't this just be an example of a multi-question survey? Such systems have existed for decades. Even Compuserve had a version of it. How would voting for the Top American Singer be any different than voting for a product to list on Massdrop?
Except all the people like you that appear to have no concept of network security. The DoD is quite capable of preventing these machines from talking to anything that is not explicitly approved.
If Microsoft can't talk to these machines remotely why are you terrified? My guess is also that the machines that matter have heavy security while the ones for unclassified email are probably not all that different from what we see in most offices. I had no trouble configuring Palo Alto or Sonicwall devices to stop all Microsoft traffic and I only dedicated half of a day to it. SCCM is the only server at the location that is allowed to talk to Microsoft so it can get updates which are then distributed on-schedule. This is not hard to do especially when you're talking about managing a large number of computers.
If you are going to use a computer with Windows 10 but prevent it from communicating with the outside world, doesn't that defeat the purpose of the automatically updating tile interface? What advantage would Windows 10 give a restricted user that Windows 7 would not? I agree it's not hard to lock down a network. It's just why use an interface specifically designed for being on an open network if that is what you are going to do?
You can be pretty sure that the version that the DoD gets will not be the same wrt phoning home as us plebes are getting.
Then it is disingenuous to say they are getting Windows 10. Instead, DoD is getting a custom version of Windows.
Answer: the court order is for Apple to write such a backdoor program.
Yes, I know, but such a program won't work retroactively to unencrypt the already encrypted data because Apple doesn't have the key. It would only work going forward. As such, the government's appeal to the courts is bogus. The back door still won't get them the unencrypted data.
Put differently, the government already has the data from the phone in question. To access the data in unencrypted form, there is nothing that Apple can do that they, themselves cannot do. If Apple acquiesced, then for future cases of terrorism where an iphone might have been involved, then the data might be accessible if the user didn't take some further measure to protect it. There are a lot of "mights" in that scenario. Of course, none of it would apply to the CA attackers because the backdoor, as far as we are being told, is not in existence.
Nine quadrillion, nine hundred trillion combinations...if I worked that web calculator correctly.
Perhaps they should try 1,2,3,4.
As others have pointed out, there are only 10,000 combinations using a four digit numeric pin. Of course, with an iphone, you only get to try ten of them incorrectly before it wipes the phone.
If Apple was telling the truth, the court order should not matter. Apple has already claimed that they cannot decrypt the phone.
That was my thought -- unless Apple isn't telling the truth.
I have a basic question. The phone in question is encrypted. How is Apple supposed to un-encrypt it without the key, which they state they do not have? Apple goes on to say, that for the future, they would have to create a back door program to do that which is an entirely different discussion. So, unless the backdoor already exists (and Apple wants to keep it secret), how can this "request" be fulfilled?