> Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, which has been ordered to help the F.B.I. get into the cell phone of the San Bernardino shooters, wrote in an angry open letter this week that "the U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create." The second part of that formulation has rightly received a great deal of attention: Should a back door be built into devices that are used for encrypted communications?
https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/a-dangerous-all-...
Apple has since confirmed in a statement provided to Ars that the US federal government "prohibited" the company "from sharing any information," but now that Wyden has outed the feds, Apple has updated its transparency reporting and will "detail these kinds of requests" in a separate section on push notifications in its next report.
They also can't refuse to comply with warrants demanding any such unencrypted data that is stored on their servers.
That's not the same thing as adding a back door to allow access to encrypted user data that is stored on the user's device.
It's also different than storing encrypted user data on your server, when you have purposefully designed a system where you don't have access to the user's encryption key.
Encrypted user data backup is the feature that Apple disabled access to in the UK rather than comply with the order to insert a back door in the OS.
I would also point out that it was Senator Wyden who initially informed the public of how much the government was already spying on their unencrypted communications.
His record on civil liberties is excellent.
Good security models typically don't hinge on being lucky.
Should we disbelieve them when they say they don't do so?
He said Apple does not have and won’t create a backdoor. That was well crafted and means exactly what he said, any implicit meaning is an artifact of your brain.
I absolutely don't actually know anything about Apple, but I've seen some of the ways even small companies legally split themselves up to avoid tax or various forms of liability. Multiple phone numbers to the same phone, multiple domains and email providers to the same laptop. Multiple denials that you've ever heard of the other company let alone happen to share the same office space...
There's a massive difference between a truthful statement and an honest one; anyone that works with code should understand that.
This leaves contact mining as the odd one out, but given how many apps want to see your contacts, you know that those are being sold by at least one of those apps.
None of this stuff has ever been end-to-end encrypted, so there can't be any way people expect it to be private.
Like for example, when they got caught selling location data they were required to protect. [0]
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/fcc_telecom_fines/
I have to imagine that the other companies are doing this as well.
It's the reason that Apple and Google recently started rebooting devices that haven't been unlocked in a while.
That seems to be the most salient property of his presidency. His position on any issue is whatever he just said, with no regard to what it might have been yesterday.
It's too bad that when he is in power he does not actually make the latter happen, because it should be scrapped entirely.
The only other country with a debt limit set in an absolute amount rather than as a percentage of GDP is Denmark, and they sensibly have set theirs far above their actual debt so it becomes just a legal formality rather than a policy tool.
The problem with it in the US is that the debt ceiling limits government borrowing to pay for debts that have already been incurred. It doesn't control the amount of spending or the deficit--that is controlled by the budget that Congress and the President approve.
If we can't just scrap it completely, then at least the budget process should be changed so every budget bill must be accompanied by a raise of the debt ceiling by enough to cover whatever extra debt that budget will be adding.
I think we're up to the killing part now.
The position of the US executive on encryption is well summarized by the Lavabit case.