Congressman Ted Lieu Statement on Apple Court Order
lieu.house.gov
lieu.house.gov
The San Bernardino massacre was tragic but weakening our
cyber security is not the answer – terrorism succeeds when
it gets us to give up our liberties and change our way of
life.
There's four computer science majors in Congress? That's four more than I would've thought.
Working in/with technology everyday, we are accustomed to wanting to find technical solutions to all of our problems. Unfortunately, not every problem can be solved with a technical solution. If we are to succeed in changing things, we need people who understand technology in positions of leadership in the government.
There are a lot of very, very intelligent people in Silicon Valley and many of you are here on HN. I wish some of you would consider running for office.
The attacker inflicted horrific mayhem and death for sure, but let not forget people die of other more common untimely causes all the time.
We put more anger against human agents rather than the impersonal forces of nature.
And it also gave people excuses to revel in their bigotry and suspicion.
What do I know? I wasn't angry that people die in a terrorist attack in France. Nor am I angered or saddened by the attacks in California.
Even now, I respond to the fact that the FBI are the bad guys because of an abstract threat to our privacy.
Terrorists don't matter to me.
They can kill a thousand men and women in a single day, and I wouldn't bat an eye.
What they did was certainly horrible, but they are of no more consequences than a thousand tragic motor accident until congress pass laws and law enforcement demands more power or that we should torture people.
Funny how that works.
That's not to say that I don't have emotion. On the contrary, the most common emotion for me seems to be cringing for other people when they made fools of themselves.
But it is true that terrorist attacks make for interesting news story, in the Chinese sense of the word.
I think you can be sad for the victims and their families and still awknowledge that other issues are more important sometimes.
That too is a very american thing these days. "Natural" disasters are seen in religious terms. Things from nature come from god and are believed unstoppable. Floods, earthquakes, tornadoes... even the suggestion that they can be mitigated or prevented is derided. Many take the suggestion that man is more powerful than nature as an affront to deeply held religious views.
Note the use of the term ISIL, not ISIS. America is all about language. Selection of terms, even pronunciation, has political meaning. Obama speaks of ISIL. Trump, ISIS. Brits, wanting to be politically correct, speak of "the so-called Islamic State", while those wanting to sound connected use the on-the-ground term "daesh". I'm tempted to create a venn diagram of these different political groups. At the centre of this diagram I should find the mythical voice of reason, a bridge transcending the idiots and capable of speaking to all sides.
I think both of these words are dog whistles in American politics, used to subtly signal, as a kind of secret handshake, that the author and the reader are on the same side.
> This FBI court order, by compelling a private sector company to write new software, is essentially making that company an arm of law-enforcement. Private sector companies are not—and should not be—an arm of government or law enforcement.
I get that, if court ordered, a company many have to hand something over. But to be court ordered to work for the government completely changes a company's business model (even if only slightly). It hampers their business (Apple isn't going to magically find, and then fire, the engineers who would need to work on this; they would have to be redirected from other projects).
Yes Apple would be compensated for their time but that doesn't change the harm it could do to their business, not just from a PR standpoint, but from the fact that they are forced to become a government contractor* and would need to redirect / shuffle resources from other projects.
* Yes yes I know Apple participates in government contracts but being forced into one is a little ridiculous.
Now Apple is bending over backwards to try to make it sound like their original argument still applies, when in fact they're making a totally different argument from what I'm going to call "encryptyness", like Colbert's "truthiness". It goes like this: "we tried really hard to protect this technology from our own capabilities, and we convinced our customers that we did, even though it's now clear that we didn't; it would hurt us to be seen helping the government in contradiction of our previous claims, so the government should pretend that we can't help them. They shouldn't be able to get court orders for anything that's encrypty enough." Or even more legally laughable, that the government shouldn't have search and seizure authority period.
The other arguments in support of Apple also have no legal merit. My favorite is the slippery slope argument, that if the government gets a taste of this power that they'll come back for more and use it on everyone's phone. Judges are fully capable of distinguishing between different circumstances. This case is decided on the merits of this case. Tomorrow's case is decided on the merits of tomorrow's case. This is a fundamental principle of common law.
The government's not asking Apple to create a backdoor for them. The door already exists and Apple created it for itself, when they didn't include Apple as a potential adversary in their threat model (which is contrary to their public claims). They could very well design their phones to not have this vulnerability, but it would require a more sophisticated approach. Apple wants the benefits of owning 'your' phone, and the benefits of not having any power over it. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
The US legal system is heavily based on following precedent.
And what's wrong with that? If they get warrants for each phone.
If the Court rules Apple can be compelled to do the work to create significantly weaker software, and then authenticate it with their signing key, it's pretty reasonable Apple will look for ways to further hard code these walls into the hardware. It's not just in their marketing interest, although that's a factor, it's to get themselves completely out of the business of even having these arguments almost every time they come up, when governments around the world say "gimme!" with a court order. If they refine this so they really can't comply, even by hacking their own products, then the only thing governments have left is to destroy the company. If they go down that road, we have much bigger problems.
It's all about threat models. If you're trying to protect your data from the government, anything that allows anyone but you to access the data is a vulnerability. Very few systems try to contend with such a threat model because it's really hard to defend against, and most people don't care about keeping their data from the government. Seamless updates are way more important to them.