In rebuking Apple “for their new smartphone encryption polices on Thursday, FBI Director James B. Comey became the latest law enforcement official to evoke worst-case scenario arguments: What of the child predator, the murderer, the terrorist? Wouldn’t you want police to be able to get into their phones?” Craig Timberg writes for The Washington Post.
MacDailyNews Take: That’s what fear mongers do. They use of fear, scare tactics, to try to influence the opinions and actions of others towards some specific end.
“This type of argument can be brought into even sharper relief by posing the hardest imaginable case: What if the FBI got its hands on Osama bin Laden’s iPhone?” Timberg writes. “Though it requires a stretch of imagination – especially given that SEAL Team Six killed bin Laden in 2011, and he didn’t use a cell phone in his final years – this example illuminates the complicated new legal and technical terrain created by Apple’s decision to release a mobile operating system that is so thoroughly encrypted that the company cannot unlock its devices for police, even if they have a search warrant.”
“It seems likely that a certain, tech-savvy brand of criminal will learn all the tricks – get iOS 8, turn off iCloud backups, use long passcodes and thwart detectives. That’s what made John J. Escalante, Chicago’s chief of detectives say, ‘Apple will become the phone of choice for the pedophile,'” Timberg writes. “Many civil liberties activists, no matter how much they may detest pedophiles, can live with that tradeoff. They want surveillance limited as much as possible, to particular, high-priority cases. They’re happy to have the government get into bin Laden’s iPhone — and into the smartphones used most of the world’s most serious criminals — just not at the price of giving police what amounts to a skeleton key to everyone else’s.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote just yesterday:
A note to FBI Director James B. Comey:
Dear lazy bastard,
Stop whining and go read the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution for what sounds like will be the first time in your life.
Again, prior to 2007, there were no evidence bonanzas from warrantless searches and seizures available right in suspects’ pockets and, yet, somehow, law enforcement personnel actually managed to solve crimes without infringing citizen’s basic constitutional rights. Use valid search warrants the way you used them before Steve Jobs gave the world the modern smartphone and tablet.
Let’s go back to following the U.S. Constitution, shall we? If it takes force from leaders like Apple for constitutional rights to be enforced, so be it.
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” – Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Edward W.” for the heads up.]
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