LETTER FROM AMERICA: Apple and the FBI
By Mark Scheinbaum
MIAMI (18 Feb 2016)—For those who feel the USA has been at war since Sept. 11, 2001 there is no tough decision for the FBI’s information request from Apple. But for the majority of Americans it is a complex philosophical and constitutional case.
The complex part will be resolved by the courts and technology. The FBI says it wants Apple to invent software for a super-fast way to cycle millions of possible pass code numbers, without erasing content on a phone after 10 unsuccessful tries. First Amendment proponents might argue the intrusion genie would be out of the cyber lantern and Big Brother will have more eyes and ears than ever.
Sadly, this is a straw man built by Silicon Valley to continue the valid and often crucial global debate over content censorship and control in some venues. This is a worthy and noble debate, but not the one on the table.
A caller to CSpan-TV summed up a rather simple interpretation. This is not verbatim but the caller said something like:
“After Pearl Harbor when the US Government told car makers that they would now be making tanks, ambulances and Jeeps, and personal civilian interests be damned, most people understood national security issues are more important than anything.”
After the World Trade Center was attacked, Pres. Bush basically said a way to defeat Al Qaida was to go about our normal lives, shop in the malls, attend ball games, and not allow the murderers to achieve a victory by changing the normal pulse of American life.
The missing piece of this approach to “war” is that the “normal” American way of life also includes excess, waste, selfish indulgence, and lack of responsibility which does little or nothing to support the serious work of those in uniform and their sacrificing families.
There are people at work today to kill Americans, and others, who do not worship the way they do, or the way they want you to worship. Your church or synagogue is their target, and even mosques that do not adhere to their own perversion of a great religion are targets.
Legal wiretaps are supposed to be secure, but are sometimes leaked.
Police surveillance is sometimes abused.
Government snooping and spying is sometimes excessive.
The more than 150 pending cases in New York where prosecutors would like to “open” cell phone data are hopefully serious inquiries, but there is no guarantee of this.
These all seem like compelling reasons for Apple to fight any government effort to do anything to allow someone to look at your phone. But if you understand that war killed people in San Bernadino who had befriended with kindness the people who killed them, you start to understand the problem of Democracy.
Sometimes we give up our natural rights for the common good.
Even doctors are not required to maintain secrecy for dead people. Even law abiding citizens know if they joke about bombing a plane in earshot of the TSA their “joke” could send them in jail.
To hide behind the First Amendment on the grounds of opening a can of worms for crooked cops and tainted federal agents who might misbehave with confidential information, is actually insulting to the evolution of the First Amendment which for the protection of all sometimes limits the privacy of some. Yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre as a joke was resolved in the 19th Century.
Technological tools for a 21st Century war must include flexibility by Apple.
There is no certainty that Apple can even solve the security puzzle posed by the FBI, but it is actually their Constitutional duty to comply, and I think the Courts will so rule.
Former UPI newsman Mark Scheinbaum, a former long term resident in Panama, is an investment executive and political scientist, who is a veteran arbitrator and mediator on financial industry and domestic court issues.
