
Congressman Ted Lieu Statement on Apple Court Order - melvinmt
https://lieu.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/congressman-lieu-statement-apple-court-order
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curun1r
A lot of focus here will be on him getting the technical details right, and I
agree that he does, but I'd like to focus on his last paragraph because I
think he gets the response to terrorism right too.

    
    
      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.
    

The terrorists don't win by killing people. The terrorists win by causing a
disproportionate response. Our best response to these attacks is to be brave
in the face of fear rather than to expect our government to make us safe.

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guptaneil
> Congressman Lieu is one of only four computer science majors in Congress.

There's four computer science majors in Congress? That's four more than I
would've thought.

~~~
jonnybgood
You'd be surprised. There was even a math major with a masters in computer
science who ran for president, Herman Cain.

~~~
natecavanaugh
Herman Cain is a Comp sci major?! Wow, I really had no idea...

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kiba
There is always talk of preventing the next terrorist attack, but there is
almost no talk about what is considered acceptable risks.

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.

~~~
econnors
We accept the risk of a car crash when we get in our car. Going to the mall or
movies doesn't have the same mental acceptance of that risk, making it more
tragic.

I think you can be sad for the victims and their families and still
awknowledge that other issues are more important sometimes.

~~~
eevilspock
We accept the risks of Freedom when we get in our Democracy.

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sandworm101
>>> Can the government force Google to provide the names of all people who
searched for the term ISIL?

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.

~~~
thrownaway2424
I noticed a similar phenomenon many years ago in the spelling of Hezbollah. I
think Hezbollah is the accepted transliteration into American English, but
authors on the far right of the domestic political spectrum distinguished
themselves with increasingly distorted spelling. Hizballah being common, but
to make it look more like Klingon some wackos started adding apostrophes, as
in Hizb'allah. This last version was especially popular on the radically
zionist blog Little Green Footballs, and was localized to such an extent that
one could recognize people who had fallen into that circle by their use of
that spelling.

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.

~~~
sandworm101
It's the "allah" part. Someone told them that Hezbollah means party of god and
"allah" is the US spelling. At a subconscious level they probably enjoy using
the term in a negative connotation.

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MaxPower9
It's comforting knowing there actually are people in congress who understand
why weakening our cybersecurity is not the answer.

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J_Nerdy
Kudos to Ted Lieu. It is frustrating that a piece of legislation passed in
1789, is being substantively applied in a manner that erodes privacy,
compromises business and does little to provide further security in ever
changing threat landscape.

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BinaryIdiot
Honestly, out of every argument I've heard in regards to this whole debacle,
this is the absolute BEST one:

> 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.

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kzhahou
And there's STILL people who insist Apple is bent on protecting the privacy of
a dead terrorist...

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marcoperaza
This argument makes no sense. There's no legal right to be free from court-
approved government surveillance. The government has always had the authority
to compel the cooperation of third-parties in search and seizure cases. This
is an awesome power, which is why you need to convince a judge to issue a
court order to use it. The only way that we ever thought encryption could
thwart surveillance is by raising technological barriers. This was Apple's
whole argument in the first place! "We can't help the government hack into
your iPhone because it's impossible for us to do it ourselves". Turns out that
they were wrong; the government did find a way to hack into it given Apple's
secrets (their code-signing key).

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.

~~~
mcphage
> Judges are fully capable of distinguishing before different circumstances.
> This case is decided on the merits of this case. Tomorrow's case is decided
> on the merits of tomorrow's case.

The US legal system is heavily based on following precedent.

~~~
marcoperaza
Precedent applies when you have facts that are fundamentally equivalent.
Forcing Apple to hack a particular phone is _totally different_ from forcing
them to ship phones with backdoors.

~~~
mcphage
So when the fact is the government has another phone they want decrypted, and
the precedent is that if you lean hard on Apple, they will make it easy to
brute force, then the result will be another phone unlocked. And another. And
another. And then they'll start leaning for something harder. If you think
that this has a chance in hell of being an isolated case, then I've got a
bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

~~~
marcoperaza
> So when the fact is the government has another phone they want decrypted,
> and the precedent is that if you lean hard on Apple, they will make it easy
> to brute force, then the result will be another phone unlocked.

And what's wrong with that? If they get warrants for each phone.

