Edward Snowden, the infamous American whistleblower now exiled in Russia, says the FBI’s claim that it cannot decode the infamous San Bernardino terrorist’s iPhone is, and I quote, “Bernie Sanders.”
Oops.
He used another word-set, also sporting the initials B. S.
I got confused because, though the press has been fretting endlessly about the B.S. coming from Donald Trump, the real corkers of late have come from Bernie Sanders, who seems to think that white people cannot be poor or oppressed* and that the successes of free markets elsewhere serve perfectly as excuses for Big Government interference here in America.**
Mr. Snowden, who knows a lot more about encryption and decryption than I do, has given more weight to my suspicion that the whole FBI case against Apple — demanding that Apple create software to decrypt the company’s customers’ iPhones, and supply (on an allegedly case-by-case basis) the decrypted private information to the government — is a sham.
Snowden insists that there are multiple ways to do the job.
“Other technologists have explained how the FBI could have easily accessed the phone’s latest iCloud backup,” a report on Snowden’s judgment elaborated, “if agents working with San Bernardino County had not reset the iCloud password.”
Once again, a government failure leads to another push by government to correct for its failure, burdening citizens.
In this case: folks at Apple.
Interestingly, Apple’s legal defense appears to rest heavily on the First Amendment’s free speech guarantees, arguing that the demanded software is value-laden speech, is literally made up of such.
The exact term is “structurally opinionated,” which I nominate for the jargon phrase of the year.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Sanders has recently said, in one of those interminable debates that I can no longer watch in full, “When you are white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto, you don’t know what it’s like to be poor, you don’t know what it’s like to be hassled when you are walking down a street or dragged out of a car.” As if “white privilege” amounts to immunity from poverty or oppression.
** Sanders, whose Tweets are as insane as his spoken pronouncements, recently lamented how Romanians in Bucharest have faster Internet speeds than Americans — without realizing they’d achieved these levels of access by wide-open, unrelenting, and wild competition. That is, Laissez Faire capitalism.
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2 replies on “Structurally Opinionated B. S.”
Leaving aside the other troubling aspects of what the FBI is trying to force Apple to do, where in the world–or in the Constitution–does the Federal government get the right to force a private business to develop for the government a product? I thought involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime, was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment.
Here’s a radical notion: instead of the Supreme Court being the final arbiter of what actions are or are not constitutional, empanel a special federal grand jury composed of a random selection of 25 citizens–none of whom are government or government paid officials–to decide. Government would never have gotten to this Leviathan stage, with the fox watching the henhouse. Further the state would not succeed in trying to make exceptions to the Constitution based on ’emergencies’ e.g. contrived enemies. [BTW, San Bernadino? Hoax. Boston? Hoax. Sandy Hook? Hoax. The next one? Hoax. All staged events with crisis actors or human simulacra. To serve a rights-destroying agenda. Blow the whistle: http://brianrwright.com/CoffeeCoasterBlog/?p=6858.