The grand question goes like this, dear worst-reader: who owns you? In the case of the individual and her/his desire to lead a digital life, your owner is your hardware supplier. (Boy did Blackberry screw this up, eh?) But the questions don’t stop there. How secure is your digital life? Worried about passwords? Worried about losing your phone? Worried about that Amazon purchase you made while connected to the Interwebnets at a coffee shop? The problem is, once you start asking one question about technology security it only leads to a bunch more. Reason? Well. Since a company like Apple puts a lot of effort into making its phones secure, why should they give up all that effort because a government agency can’t do it’s job in the first place? Does that agency really need access to my/our digital world? Besides the fact that the FBI, IMHO, is one of the most useless agencies every created by our grand dysfunctional government, no agency should get a backdoor to my phone. Heck, if granting backdoor access to Apple iPhones is what the FBI needs to “protect” the US from bad guys, that’s just more proof of how useless the agency is. Let’s not forget–as we #americants often do–that it really doesn’t matter if the FBI can make your digital life insecure or not! The question is, what will the FBI do with access to our digital lives? Do you want the FBI to possess a key to your house? How about the pin number to your debit card? How about access to your PC? A copy of the key to your bank safe deposit box? Heck, the US government knew about all those 9/11 guys being in the US (and how they went to strip clubs!) and it also knew about an imminent attack from Osama Bin Hasen. (Hasen is German for rabbit.) What about the Boston bombers? The FBI was tracking one of those guys for a while, weren’t they? Oh yeah. If the government would have taken one of those guys out before their bombing spree then maybe $300m wouldn’t get spent on trying to catch them. (Just google it.) What good did any of that information do for anybody? Oh. I guess, at least, 9/11 made a few well connected government officials very, very rich. But I digress. §My point is this: backdoor access to technology by a government agency should not be granted under any circumstances. I hope Apple wins this one. But I’m not sure it will. Remember: government is the Frankenstein Monster, the electorate is Frankenstein (the crazy grave robbing doctor). Rant on.
Link that motivated this post:
worstwriter 