Category Archives: Privacy

Why Trump Needs To Stop Ditching The Press Pool

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At least that’s what Juan Williams thinks in his Fox News piece last Thursday.  He’s far from the only pressman who thinks so, too.

It seems that President-elect Donald Trump was rude enough to want to have dinner out with a few folks without the madding crowd of papparazi and other reporters hanging over their shoulders.  So he and his group evaded the press pool that was following him around.

“THERE’S GUNFIRE—WE’RE MOVING THE PRESIDENT.”

I heard those scary words from a Secret Service agent on October 23, 1983. I was covering President Reagan for The Washington Post and happened to be near the tiny group of journalists—the so-called “presidential press pool,” as he attended the Master’s golf tournament.

Then, as the president was leaving the Augusta National Golf Club the news broke that 241 American servicemen had been killed when terrorists bombed the US Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon.

Those were chaotic moments.

Those were the chaotic paragraphs with which Williams opened his screed over Trump’s presuming to decline to not cater to the self-important press.  This sort of thing is an outlier, too, and unlikely to be missed just because a President wants a (relatively) quiet dinner on the town.

Similarly, Trump did not take a press pool with him when he went to the White House last week for his first sit-down with President Obama. He did not have reporters on the plane he used during the campaign.

How rude!  He didn’t bring a gaggle with him to a business meeting.  Cluck, cluck.

These pressmen choose not to consider factors involved in Trump’s decision to ditch the press so he and his family could enjoy a steak dinner, to take one of these plaints.  Personal, individual decisions (which don’t matter to the NLMSM, since they don’t see Americans as individuals, they only see us as either cookie cutter, interchangeable, correct consumers of their stuff or as cookie cutter, interchangeable racists and homophobes who disagree with them), like other folks wanting to go to a restaurant to enjoy a steak dinner.

Now, when a President wants to go anywhere—a steakhouse, let’s say—he unavoidably must be accompanied by his Secret Service protection detail.  These additional six men and women (to pick a number for discussion’s sake) are going to take up space in that restaurant, but that’s unavoidable, and these men and women know how to be discrete and unobtrusive—that’s part of their protection job.

But the press?  They’re crowding around asking questions—loudly, so as to be heard above their fellows—pushing microphones and cameras aggressively, so as to get the audio and the video.  It’s their job to be heard and to be as disruptive as necessary in order to get their question(s) to be the one the President answers.  They’ll even try to get “reaction” shots and questions asked of the other patrons in that restaurant.  And that’s enormously disruptive, to the restaurant, to those other diners trying to enjoy their steak dinners, even to the passersby on the sidewalk outside.

Do the pressmen care?  Not a bit.  These self-important ones care only about their stories and their bylines.

Don’t ditch the press all the time, Mr President.  But unhesitatingly ditch them on occasion when you want to be out and about and don’t want to interfere with the doings of others who also want to be out and about and happen to be near you at the time.

Honeypots

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In the cyber world, a honeypot

consists of data (for example, in a network site) that appears to be a legitimate part of the site but is actually isolated and monitored, and that seems to contain information or a resource of value to attackers, which are then blocked.

Of course, nothing prevents nefarious persons or entities from using honeypots to draw in honest folks for nefarious purposes.  Purposes like the following.

The trove of leaked Democratic National Committee emails posted to Wikileaks on July 22 has sparked concerns about malware as users access the vast trove of documents.
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On the day of the leak, Google’s Transparency Report warned users of dangerous downloads from Wikileaks.org. Google has not revealed specifically what was detected….

Malware was detected in the Global Intelligence Files dumped last year by Wikileaks, too.  Further, Wikileaks actually could be a victim in this malware ploy, too: they do little of their own hacking, getting their stuff from other sources.  One of their sources already has been implicated in the recent hacks of Democratic Party IT facilities like the DNC, DNCC, and Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign email servers, along with Clinton’s official State Department business personal email server: Russia is suspected of conducting these particular hacks.

Are these guys—Russians, Chines, ordinary thieves—setting up other botnets?  Setting up sources for stealing personal financial data or data useful for blackmail or data useful for espionage, with these sources to be tapped at a time of convenience in the future?  Setting up something else?

The Feds Want to be in your Child’s School Bathroom

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…right along with anyone else confused about who should or should not be there.

The Obama administration will send a letter to every public school district in the country telling them to allow transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that match their chosen gender identity, as opposed to their birth certificate.

President Barack Obama (D) threatened in his letter to withhold Federal funding for those school districts impertinent enough to not comply with his decree.  South Dakota v Dole might have an impact on his threat, but Obama has never let legitimacy get in the way of his edicts, and this is another lame duck/what’re-you-gonna-do-about-it-in-my-last-8-months example.

The Obama letter includes this gem:

As is consistently recognized in civil rights cases, the desire to accommodate others’ discomfort cannot justify a policy that singles out and disadvantages a particular class of students[.]

The class of students that consists of straight boys and girls don’t matter, though.  They need to check their privilege at the bathroom door.

Encryption and Safety

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Senators Richard Burr (R, NC) and Dianne Feinstein (C, CA), in their op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, demonstrated their lack of understanding of the relationship between security and safety.  Their piece’s title, Encryption Without Tears, illustrates their basic misunderstanding of the inherent tension between the two, here encryption and safety.

In an increasingly digital world, strong encryption of devices is needed to prevent criminal misuse of data.  But technological innovation must not mean placing individuals or companies above the law.

Neither can technological backdoors be allowed to place government above the law.

Over the past year the two of us have explored the challenges associated with criminal and terrorist use of encrypted communications.

But they’ve apparently spent not a red sou on exploring the challenges of a private citizens or private enterprises need for and use of encryption to protect themselves from criminal, and terrorist, and yes government misbehaviors.

Then they cited a couple of examples to illustrate their thesis; I’ll cite one of those below, because it so clearly illustrate the opposite and some interlinkage of the Left’s position on American safety (and disappointingly, Burr’s lack of thought).

…the Islamic State-inspired terrorist attack last year in Garland, Texas.  FBI Director Jim Comey said the attackers “exchanged 109 messages with an overseas terrorist” the morning of the shooting, but the FBI cannot access those messages to determine the exact role of Islamic State in the shooting and how to help prevent future attacks.

There’s no doubt that being able to read those messages would have been very useful.  However, Burr and Feinstein carefully neglect to mention that the Islamic State-inspired terrorist attack was stopped in its tracks and the terrorists killed on the spot by armed American citizens who were alert, on the scene, and unafraid to act.  The San Bernardino attack, for which Comey went to court to try to force Apple to break its own security algorithms (under the false claim that Apple’s efforts were absolutely necessary, mind you—until the FBI broke the algorithms with other means), occurred in a by-government-mandate gun-free zone, which ensured that only the terrorists had guns.  We’re left to speculate on how far the casualty list would have been reduced had the victim population been allowed to be armed themselves.  As the Left likes to say, though, “If it saves only one life….”

Yet Burr and Feinstein are “circulating” a draft bill:

The draft proposal requires a person or a company—when served with a court order—to provide law enforcement with information (in readable form) or appropriate technical assistance that is responsive to the judicial request.  This will enable law enforcement to conduct investigations using the communications involved in criminal and terrorist activities.

Our draft bill wouldn’t impose a one-size-fits-all solution on all covered entities….

The judicial request.  Carefully vague.  It may be the case, though, that their bill wouldn’t impose a one-size-fits-all solution.  No, it’ll just require an ex post back door to be created, one that’s usable for future “situations,” too, and the aggregation of which will allow government snooping.

It’s just this sort of Government arrogance, or even merely disingenuousness, against which we have such extensive protections against overreaching government men.  The government isn’t even pretending to act in good faith on this matter, as Comey’s behavior in that Apple case demonstrates.

Private encryption, with no backdoors, and an armed population.  That permits an optimum mix of security and safety and encryption with a minimum of tears.  Backdoors on Government demand permits the least mix of security and safety, broken encryption guaranteed to generate tears.

Cyberthreat Information Sharing

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The public and private sectors need to increasingly declassify and divulge critical information if the U.S. is to set up effective cyberthreat organizations, according to a report released Wednesday by PwC that sets out a blueprint for how those groups could be set up.

That would certainly lead to faster responses to hack attempts—committed by anyone, whether governments foreign or domestic or criminals—and to more efficient hardening against present and future hack attempts.

Unfortunately, FBI Director James Comey has already written off the concept of public sector—at the Federal government level, anyway—cyberthreat sharing.

That’s a very clear indication of what this administration and its potential Progressive-Democrat successor administration thinks about Government controls.