Tag: security

Breaking the Safe

surveillance, privacy, iphone, security, NSA, CIA, FBI, terrorism, illustration

As we tromp repeatedly to the polling booth this year, we should wonder: are we being played?

The answer: yes . . . at least on the issue of Apple’s iPhone security.

I’ve written about this before. Our politicians and government officials are playing demagogue, trying to convert (too successfully?) the electorate into a mob bent on destroying privacy and private property — out of unwarranted fear.

The case for terrorist worries in this case is not even plausible: the FBI waited too long to be convincing, and the NSA supposedly has the metadata anyway. The government doesn’t need the info. It’s after something else.

As former congressman Bob Barr put it, the government’s case is “pure applesauce . . . simply the latest chapter in a decades-long push by Uncle Sam to gain access to Americans’ digital technology and place this booming sector of our economy under its thumb.” He goes on:

[T]he government is for the first time demanding that a company actually invent a way to defeat the very encryption safeguards it builds into the devices it sells. Attorney General Lynch has taken to citing an obscure law, the All Writs Act of 1789, to justify this unprecedented exercise of power to compel companies to do the government’s work for it.

To my knowledge, the government has never demanded that Allied Safe and Vault, or any of its competitors, go out of its way to cook up “a way in” to its security systems.

Government is just trying to retain its old relevance. Folks in power see it slipping. And it is, as Americans outsource their privacy and security not to governments, but, increasingly, to private providers.

That’s a good thing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Internet privacy, privacy, security, terrorism

Accountability crime and punishment general freedom government transparency moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies responsibility too much government U.S. Constitution

Zetabytes and Zombies

Zombie government wants to eat our brains. Did I overstate this on Sunday?

Most folks don’t look at the Apple/FBI controversy over digital security quite that starkly.

The National Security Administration sure doesn’t see it that way. The NSA is in the “information harvesting business,” says Business Insider. And boy, “business is booming.” The NSA measures its operations in zetabytes. And in the acreage of its Maryland and Utah sprawls.

The idea is that the NSA protects us.

But notice that government, collecting all that information, and in trying to beat back malicious and sportive hacker attacks from around the world, treats computer companies antagonistically. And it doesn’t provide us, individually, with help on our personal cyber-security: we have to pay for our own cyber-security. When some thief (local or overseas) steals a digital identity and grabs a netizen’s wealth and credit, of what help is government?

Not much.

It’s little different from back in Herbert Spencer’s day, over a century ago, when he noted that government practiced “that miserable laissez faire,” making citizens bear the costs of their own protection, to financial ruin defending themselves in court.

Indeed, for all our reliance upon law enforcement, we have to notice that the real work of defense and conflict avoidance happens best outside of government “help” — as is the case in Detroit, Michigan, where it is private security that does what many expect the police to do.

As long as the police and the federal government operate mainly as antagonists to peaceful citizens as well as to criminals, then looking warily at police power and privilege (and thus the NSA and the FBI) seems like . . .

. . . Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Apple, NSA, privacy, security, terrorism

folly general freedom national politics & policies too much government

Political Theatrics

Our suspicions have been proved: the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) doesn’t secure much of anything; it is mere “security theater.”

After revelations that TSA screeners failed to find weapons and other deadly contraband in 96 percent of tests, David A. Graham, writing for The Atlantic, asked “what kind of theater this is. . . . A period drama, satirizing the 2000s? Vaudeville farce?”

Easy answer: the genre is “statism.”

Statism is the worship of government, or the reliance upon government to do many more than a few tasks. It is very old.

The ancient states arose from conquest, developing as a way to milk the masses for the benefit of the few. That’s what states traditionally do: use force to move wealth from one group to another.

Along the way, the states did do some good. Amidst all their horrors.

But mostly rulers just leveraged myth and bluster to cover crimes.

In more recent times, in this great country, the idea arose that the state should be limited to a few necessary jobs, tightly controlled by the people so that government might actually defend rights, not abridge them.

But this revolutionary democratic-republican ideology did not alter the basic nature of reality, turning the sow’s purse of the conquerors’ art into the gold of the Public Interest.

Without our vigilance, government always reverts back to its roots.

The TSA is simply the latest myth-and-bluster-backed scam aiding the ludicrous notion that government is all-powerful . . . while providing only faux security. Get rid of it; let its people go. Then watch airlines come up with more effective, less intrusive, more passenger-friendly security systems.

Want theater? Try “vigilance theater.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags security, statism, terrorism, TSA

general freedom government transparency national politics & policies privacy too much government

Rand to the Rescue

Nothing gets done in Washington?

Tell that to Kentucky Senator and presidential hopeful Rand Paul. Last night, he single-handily “repealed” Section 215 of the Patriot Act, ending the federal government’s mass collection of our phone records.

At least, for the next few days.

On the floor of the Senate, Paul blocked the USA Freedom Act, a “compromise” bill passed by the House. It would’ve required private telecoms to keep the data, allowing the government to query that data with a warrant.

“I’m supportive of the part that ends the bulk collection by the government,” said Paul. “My concern is that we might be exchanging bulk collection by the government [with] bulk collection by the phone companies.”

In a Time magazine op-ed, he argued, “We should not be debating modifying an illegal program. We should simply end this illegal program.”

Also last week, the Tea Party Patriots joined the ACLU in agreeing with Paul’s position: the USA Freedom Act doesn’t go far enough . . . to protect our civil rights.

Others warn we aren’t safe without maximum snooping and info-scooping by government:

CIA Director John Brennan called the metadata program “integral to making sure that we’re able to stop terrorists in their tracks.”
Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the expiration amounted to “a serious lapse.”
James Clapper, director of National Intelligence — most famous now for lying to Congress about the existence of the metadata program — declared we “would lose entirely an important capability that helps us identify potential U.S.-based associates of foreign terrorists.”

Yet, there’s not a single case where this bulk phone data helped capture a terrorist or stop an attack.

Sen. Paul believes “we can still catch terrorists using the Constitution.”

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Tags 2016 Presidential race, freedom act, patriot act, privacy, Rand Paul, security, Senate

Accountability general freedom national politics & policies

Against Regimentation

On Monday, Senator Rand Paul got caught in a contretemps with the TSA. He was not in transit to or from his work in Congress, so he couldn’t enlist constitutional protection from being detained.

And detained he was.

Well, the TSA insists that he was not “at any point detained,” but what he says is this:

I was detained by the Transportation Security Administration . . . for not agreeing to a patdown after an irregularity was found in my full body scan. Despite removing my belt, glasses, wallet and shoes, the scanner and TSA also wanted my dignity. I refused.

I showed them the potentially offending part of my body, my leg. They were not interested. They wanted to touch me and to pat me down. I requested to be rescanned. They refused and detained me in a 10-foot-by-10-foot area reserved for potential terrorists.

Both Senator Paul and his father, Congressman Ron Paul, have criticized the TSA. They echo those 19th century classical liberals who had a word for the kind of treatment that modern security-obsessed Rand Paul makes a statement governments inflict upon a (too willing) populace: “regimentation.” What’s more regimenting than being forced to wait in lines, holding shoes in hand, emptying the contents of pockets into institutional-gray trays, submitting to a variety of scans and gropes?

There have got to be better ways of securing big ol’ jet airliners. Why not apply greater legal liability to airlines for safety, and let them figure out more customer-friendly methods of keeping terrorists out of cockpits?

Any government security effort ought to focus on spotting and stopping terrorists . . . without sacrificing everyone’s freedom and dignity.

It’s Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.