Thoughts on the FBI vs Apple situation?

[DoYouKubuntu]

I'm enjoying, and appreciating, every single comment in this thread, whether I agree with them or not. It's fascinating the way different people see the same situation so differently.

[dibl]

I'm enjoying, and appreciating, every single comment in this thread, whether I agree with them or not. It's fascinating the way different people see the same situation so differently.

I agree 100%.

Kubicle makes a great argument, but I am still looking at Apple and thinking "Ahmed the Terrorist's little helper".

[kubicle]

but I am still looking at Apple and thinking "Ahmed the Terrorist's little helper".

IMO the "terrorist's little helpers" are the fear mongers in our societies (these include some politicians, government institutions, sensationalist media, agitators etc.). The goal of terrorism is to cause fear (often irrational, disproportional amount of fear) or "terror" if you prefer, hence the name.

And people do a lot of dumb things when they're afraid (including giving up their civil liberties, or voting for morons to lead them)...unfortunate most of these things don't do anything to alleviate the fear, the fear sticks no matter what they do.

The best (and only) way to beat terrorism is to not be afraid, like Roosevelt said: "the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself".

[GreyGeek]

EVERY legislator, mayor, president, law officer, military ... all of them swore an oath to "protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, both foreign and domestic", and they swore that they "took this obligation without mental reservation or purpose of evasion". Following their election and swearing in ceremony nearly every Congress person, the President, several Supreme Court justices and subordinate judges, the IRS, EPA, and the FBI are guilting of purjury for lying in taking that oath. The members of the FBI took that oath and yet their solution to "protecting" the Constitution is to destroy it.. Now, they want the right to do warrantless searches of one's personal affects without the need of a warrant.

It it used to be that in order to search a person's home or personal effects law officers needed a warrant signed by a real judge which specifically listed the location, time and the item(s) being searched for. Now, FBI writes and signs their own warrants and make them so general that they are nothing more than fishing licenses looking for any justification for charging a person with a felony. There are now so many laws on the books that carry penalties of severe fines or imprisonment the attempts to count them have failed. It is NOT possible for any American to know all the laws which he must obey, or which failure to obey can lead to fines and prison..
http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=1008

The Forth Amendment is, for all practical purposes, dead. You can be stopped for any or no reason on the highways of America and if the policeman finds any significant amount of money on your person they immediate accuse you of money laundering and confiscate the money using elements of the RICCO Act. Even if you later prove you are innocent of the charges and your arrest was frivolous and capricious the police have no obligation to return your money. The RICCO Act is now the #1 method police departments have for supplementing their budgets.

The Fifth Amendment has so many exceptions and traps built around it that merely "taking the 5th" can and is routinely dismissed by judges and defendants are forced to testify against a themselves or risk fines and indefinite incarceration for "contempt of court". Spouses are now routinely forced to testify against their partner under threat of criminal charges. The laws are no so vague and loose that a prosecutor can interpret them about anyway they want. They control a grand jury by selecting who sets on it and what they will see. A prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.

The oil situation has not changed. The low hanging fruit of the oil reserves have been picked. The massive fields and wells found in Saudi Arabia in the late 1940s to the mid 1950s, is a thing of the past. Wells from those fields have been producing 1,000,000 barrels of oil a day for the last 70 years but they are now in the final stages of secondary recovery and the Middle East countries are desperately looking for other sources of income. Those were called "giant" fields. Now, oil companies like BP call the gulf coast field, "Deep Water Hirizons" a giant field, but its total capacity was only 50 million barrels, 50 days production of a single well in Saudia Arabia. And they spilled 10% of it into the gulf before they successfully called it.

The success of horizontal drilling radiating from a single wellhead has resulted in the exploitation of oil formations which were too shallow to exploit with a vertical hole. This has led to an oil "boom" which has made America the world's #1 oil producer. Before horizontal drilling America was importing 60% of its oil needs and gasoline prices were exceeding $5/gal in many places. Now, gasoline is dropping below $1/gal in some places. Indeed, the price of oil has dropped so low that oil producers can't make a profit. Boom towns in North Dakota have become ghost towns. Production has declined and prices will rise again. Here is the kicker: farming is just a way of converting oil into food. It takes seven times more energy to bring a slice of bread to your breakfast table than you get when you eat it. If oil reserves and production decline hundreds of millions will learn that food doesn't grow on grocery shelves, but they will starve to death learning that lesson. Regardless of the promises and assumptions of the Bakken Oil Field we are well down the backside of the Gaussian curve of oil production. We long ago burned the principle and are now burning the interest. If we had begun a 3% annual decline in our oil consumption (cut consumption in half every 25 years) we would have left some oil, gas and coal for our grandchildren and their grandchildren. As it is, fossile fuels, the principle resource for chemicals, plastics and medicine won't be available to them.

[NickStone]

...Now, oil companies like BP call the gulf coast field, "Deep Water Hirizons" a giant field, but its total capacity was only 50 million barrels, 50 days production of a single well in Saudia Arabia. And they spilled 10% of it into the gulf before they successfully called it.

It wasn't BP who operated the drilling rig that caused the environmental disaster, the of rig was owned and operated by an American company on behalf BP. Source for reference is here -> http://www.britannica.com/event/Deep...-spill-of-2010

[GreyGeek]

It wasn't BP who operated the drilling rig that caused the environmental disaster, the of rig was owned and operated by an American company on behalf BP. Source for reference is here -> http://www.britannica.com/event/Deep...-spill-of-2010

Actually, while Transocean owned and operated the rig, it was leased to BP and THEY called the shots. They are responsible. Engineers who survived the explosion said that their safety concerns about defective equipment and procedures were overridden by BP managers. Just like when Morton-Thiokol and NASA managers overrode the launch engineer Ebeling's reminder that the O-rings were only good down to 40F, not 18F. and forced the launch of Challenger, killing 8 people.

Interestingly, just a month before the DWH blowout, the EXXON company finished the last of its court cases regarding the Valdez spill in Prince Edwards Sound, twenty years before. EXXON had promised that they would reimburse the full costs of all losses experienced by everyone harmed by the leak. In fact, their payouts averaged 10 cents on the dollar, for which their lawyers were rewarded very handsomely.

I failed to mention the original reason for my previous post, and that is to point out that in EVERY case politicians have passed controversial laws or regulations, what they claim would be the result was the direct opposite. The income tax was passed with the claim that it would only affect the top 1% of the population. Now, the middle class takes the brunt of the tax burden. The top 1% have exemption holes big enough to drive through and the bottom half have huge entitlements that not only exempt them from paying taxes, they get "refunds" on taxes they didn't pay. Negative income taxes. When the DOJ found that the lawyers they hired were not as good as the lawyers the MAFIA hired they got the RICCO Act, and civil forfeiture, which Congress promised would only affect organized crime. They lied. The RICO Act is used over 10,000 times a year on average citizens to fund police department budgets and to give perks to management and city fathers.

The DOJ claims that they are going to suspend the "controversial program" in a couple months. Right.

The PATRIOT Act is an abomination that makes a mockery of the freedoms it purports to protect. NSA letters that eliminate a person's free speech rights to prevent even mentioning discussing legal actions taken against that person to that person's spouse or family. The evidence or witnesses against the person are not allowed to be cross examined by the defense council because of "national security". The NSA has created a gigantic data center in Utah that has the ability to store 12 Exabytes of data, enough to store 37 Billion bytes of data for each person in America, or 1.3 Billion bytes for each person on the planet. If text equal to the size of the Bible were stored for each person NSA has enough capacity to store information on everyone on the planet for more than the next 200 years.

With the IRS already blocking applications for 501c status because of political leanings, and fast tracking others for the same reason, and the EPA using its power to push Social Justice Warriors agendas, and the FBI sending agents to trouble spots to "educate" and fund people on how to protest, and the list goes on and on, anyone who thinks that the FBI is not going to use the power of a back door on everyone's iPhone to hack personal information anytime they want without a warrant is a living Pollyanna.

I have little doubt that events like those listed above are the reasons why the average American is "I'm as mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore!".

[DoYouKubuntu]

The NSA has created a gigantic data center in Utah that has the ability to store 12 Exabytes of data, enough to store 37 Billion bytes of data for each person in America, or 1.3 Billion bytes for each person on the planet. If text equal to the size of the Bible were stored for each person NSA has enough capacity to store information on everyone on the planet for more than the next 200 years.

This is astonishing, and I hadn't heard it before.

[GreyGeek]

This is astonishing, and I hadn't heard it before.

I've read that the capacity of that Utah Data Center could be in the Yottabyte range but I defaulted to the more believable Exabyte range. Who, except the NSA, really knows? This year it is estimated that the total Internet traffic will be 1.3 Zettabytes, or, 1,300 Exabytes.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Looks like lawmakers are as split on this as we are! From today's LA Times:

The heated dispute over the FBI effort to force Apple to help unlock an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino killers moved Tuesday to Capitol Hill, where lawmakers appear deeply divided on the issue.

FBI Director James B. Comey and Apple’s general counsel, Bruce Sewell, both testified at a crowded House Judiciary Committee hearing on encryption and the balance between privacy and national security.

Comey warned that public safety may suffer if Apple and other Silicon Valley companies can defy court-ordered warrants to cooperate with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.

“If there are warrant-proof spaces in American life, what does that mean? And what are the consequences of that?” Comey asked.

Comey denied Sewell's claim that the FBI is asking for a "backdoor" key to open Apple devices, insisting the California case is focused only on a single iPhone 5c.

“There is already a door on the iPhone," he said, referred to the encrypted password. "We are asking Apple to take the vicious guard dog away and let us pick the lock."

The FBI wants Apple to write software that would turn off a security feature designed to wipe out data if ten incorrect password attempts are made to enter the phone. Once those settings are disabled, the FBI would then try passwords until the phone unlocks.

<< snip >>

[claydoh]

Back to the original topic, lol!

His last line is priceless, and it going over the RT guy's head even more so.

[Snowhog]

In the purest sense of market capitalism, the FBI should just contract with Apple (i.e., pay them) to have that one particular phone modified to remove the '10 attempts we erase the phone feature'. When that has been done, the FBI can bring their 'team' to Apple and run their 'brute force' attack to guess the password and unlock the phone. That done, the FBI can then copy all the data off the phone, and Apple can then destroy that phone in the presence of, and witnessed by, the FBI. Anything more than that is a serious case of Government overreach.

But, even with that being said, I think that what McAfee stated is pretty much true; once you have a computer in your possession, people with the appropriate skills can successfully hack into it. And if we accept that as true, and further accept that the FBI has or has access to such people, then what they are demanding instead really is scary.

[GreyGeek]

... then what they are demanding instead really is scary.

It is. The request/demand? for a backdoor is confusing considering that it was FBI Director Comey, acting as AG in 2004 while Ashcroft was in the hospital, refused to certify as legal certain aspects of the NSA spying program. Now he wants a backdoor into iPhones? I doubt that it would stop there. Unless they have the ability to hack Android phones. What this will lead to is what have been doing for years. Using PGP to encrypt zip files containing private info before sending them to recipients whom I've already given a key. But, considering that the IRS, banks, credit card companies, phone companies like Verizon, AT&T, etc., already give LEO's access to your private information, sometimes with warrants, sometimes without, the government already knows pretty much everything about you. The only ones we are keeping secrets from are the hackers. That's reason enough to use Linux on your PC. I have put just about everything on my iPhone 6+. IF Apple gives into the FBI I will brick my phone just on general principals and get a flip phone.