Welcome to the Autocracy — Implies FBI Director James B. Comey

29 September 2014

Would an American government official have said anything close to this 50 years ago?

From Allen McDuffee, writing for the Wire:

With the release of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus and iOS 8, Apple has provided customers with a phone that encrypts emails, pictures and contacts based on a complex mathematical algorithm that uses a code unique to the phone's owner, something that Apple says it does not have access to.

The result, the company is essentially saying, is that if Apple is sent a court order demanding that the contents of an iPhone 6 be provided to intelligence agencies or law enforcement, it will turn over gibberish, along with a note saying that to decode the phone’s emails, contacts and photos, investigators will have to break the code or get the code from the phone’s owner.

Breaking the code, according to an Apple technical guide, could take “more than 5 1/2 years to try all combinations of a six-character alphanumeric passcode with lowercase letters and numbers.” (Computer security experts question that figure, because Apple does not fully realize how quickly the N.S.A. supercomputers can crack codes.)

“What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to hold themselves beyond the law," said F.B.I Director James B. Comey at a Thursday news conference.

In other words, if “we” can’t spy on you and understand what you’re saying, you’re a criminal.

By Director Comey’s logic, if I were the last speaker of a vanished language and created a company that translated English into that language for cell phone purposes, I would be a treasonous crook.

Daily Tech blogger, Jason Mick took an equally jaundiced view of Director Comey’s totalitarian-embracing political philosophy

He wrote:

[T]he FBI's concern is even more outlandish, as in essence they're arguing that locks are too dangerous to be owned. By that logic, citizens who place a lock on their front door and put personal possessions in a locked file cabinet or safe are "above the law".

[H]e's making these arguments because the leadership of the FBI is enabling agents on the force who are simply too lazy to actually do real investigative work.

It appears the FBI wishes that citizens would just hand it evidence. It seems Director Comey and his advisors need a cold dose of reality. Sacrificing freedom for convenience is the path to tyranny.

The moral? — America’s new autocratically leaning era is an affront to its past

But the public, perpetually scared of shadows rather than realities, seems not to care.

Somewhere along the way, our spines and liberty values have drained away. Which says something pessimistic about the viability of democracy.

PeteFree.com

Welcome to the Autocracy — Implies FBI Director James B. Comey