Tag Archives: freedom

Privacy and Government

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…and government shoe-squeezing.

The No. 2 official at the Justice Department [Deputy Attorney General James Cole] delivered a blunt message last month to Apple Inc executives: new encryption technology that renders locked iPhones impervious to law enforcement would lead to tragedy. A child would die, he said, because police wouldn’t be able to scour a suspect’s phone, according to people who attended the meeting.

The naked panic-mongering is something we’d expect to get out of the press, but for a high-ranking government official to spout such nonsense is…unseemly. For Cole to masquerade his extreme outlier as the trend that must result, though, is dishonest. But it’s all good—DoJ must be able to snoop into Americans’ communications on DoJ’s own recognizance. Because, of course, no American administration would abuse its discretion.

This comes on the heels of another DoJ overwrought claim.

Last month, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey said new Apple and Google encryption schemes would “allow people to place themselves beyond the law.”

This is the risk a free people take; it’s a risk the free American people have said repeatedly we’re willing and anxious to take. Because such encryption schemes also would “allow people to place themselves beyond an overreaching government.” Which overreach the crocodile tears and manufactured crises of Cole and Comey demonstrate this government is committing.

Give up some freedom—some privacy from government snooping—in order to have security? Pssh. Without the freedom, without the privacy from government snooping, there can never be any security.

Another Cyber Threat

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…and an empty solution.

[NSA Director and Commander, US Cyber Command Admiral Michael] Rogers said he believed China along with “one or two” other countries had the capability to successfully launch a cyber-attack that could shut down the electric grid in parts of the United States.

And

US adversaries are performing electronic “reconnaissance” on a regular basis so that they can be in a position to attack the industrial control systems that run everything from chemical facilities to water treatment plants.

We’ve known the PRC, Russia, and have been hacking into a broad variety of our computer systems for some years. Rogers is correct that “if the US remains on the defensive, it would be a ‘losing strategy.'”

However, his insistence that

agreeing to an international code, a sort of “laws of law” in the cyber realm, is urgent[]

is wrong. These three nations are not going to honor any restrictions on their war fighting behaviors. Nor will any other nation that develops such a capability and then uses it.

What’s urgent is that we improve our defensive capability so that we can block—and preempt—further cyber recce runs and any attack. What’s urgent is that we develop our offensive cyber and physical capabilities so that we can fight a total cyber war, in conjunction with a physical response, to the total destruction of our attacker(s)’ ability to attack us again, much less continue its present attack.

Anything less is just selling us down the river.

Wrong Answer

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At this week’s G-20 meeting in Australia, British Prime Minister David Cameron outlined his proposed restrictions on speech as a mechanism for combatting terrorism and youth radicalization at home.

Cameron told the Parliament the root cause of extremism was not poverty, social isolation from the mainstream or foreign policy.

“The root cause of the challenge we face is the extremist narrative. So we must confront this extremism in all its forms,” Cameron said.

“We must ban extremist preachers from our country. We must root out extremism from our schools, universities and prisons[.]”

This is the wrong answer.

Youth “radicalization” is a part of growing up as children test boundaries, learn more, test more boundaries, and so on. It’s how they learn initiative and individual responsibility.

“Extreme” speech also is a way of pushing boundaries. More importantly, it’s a way of drawing the public’s and government’s attention to this or that problem, and of pushing authorities to take corrective action—where appropriate. The public, after all, is fully capable determining for itself whether the problem described really is worth any hoo-raw.

Most importantly, though, it’s an extremely dangerous thing for government to limit speech or radical behavior. What’s the limiting principle for such limits? In what way government draw the line here, and not one syllable further? In what way can government say this is too radical, but that is not? In what way can government discriminate incitement to riot from a misunderstood speech?

“I know it when I see it,” as a Supreme Court Justice said about pornography, is a poor standard, and it leaves the matter open to government abuse. If this speech is too extreme, then what about that speech? And the next speech? Absent a clearly stated limit—and Cameron appears to have offered none—there’s nothing to keep government from adding limits, extending them, barring, for instance, criticism of government as prejudicial to good order.

No, a better answer is to let the speech fly, let the “radicalization” occur. Give parents and schools the tools to teach better (which begins with holding the parents accountable for their failure to be parents). Let the “radicalized” go join the terrorists overseas—don’t let them come back. Punish the domestic crimes when they occur, don’t make additional crimes through legislation. There is already a sufficiency (and perhaps too many) conspiracy laws on the books which can be used to preempt domestic crime and terrorist activities; enforce these, don’t create more conspiracy crimes legislatively.

Cameron’s proposal is disappointing from the leader of the birthplace of John Locke.

Intelligence Fusion

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Intel fusion is the process of putting together disparate—often widely disparate—bits of information, from a wide variety of sources, to achieve a larger, coherent picture of various goings-on (and to rule out as truly unrelated some of those bits).

We’ve had in our recent past (as far as is being discovered by the public) a number of not too disparate, but seemingly relatively trivial on an individual basis, hacks by the People’s Republic of China of lower level US government agencies. They’ve hacked, for instance, our weather systems and satellite network, corporate email networks, the Federal government’s OPM computers, the White House’s computer networks, state and Federal level DMV databases, and on and on.

Often, the hacks really are directly useful: they get intellectual property, proprietary financial information, defense secrets, and so on.

But these hacks, rather their entry points, also represent windows into the government house—the Chinese sneak into our house through a variety of windows, since the front (and maybe back) doors are more or less locked.

What does fusion say about these disparate hacks? Are they just random probes? Pokings around to see what’s what or to see what they can get away with? Or, what’s getting planted in the way of malware that, once through the window, moves along, penetrating more deeply, perhaps proliferating? Once past the outer firewalls (the software version of a house’s locked entryways), what thefts are being set up for future use, what Stux-like sabotage is being prepared for future mid-crisis execution?

Maybe nothing. Maybe….

I’d rather be foolishly paranoid, though, than innocent and vulnerable.

A Bureaucratic State

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The Hong Kong protestors have called for Hong Kong’s legislators to resign, which would trigger elections right there in Hong Kong and which would also serve as a popular referendum on Hong Kong’s—and the PRC’s—government policies.

Hong Kong’s response? From Chief Secretary Carrie Lam:

There are no arrangements in place for a so-called referendum in Hong Kong’s electoral and political system….

The bureaucrat is incapable of imagining doing anything non-standard, the bureaucracy cannot find a way to accommodate the people when there’s nothing in their written-down procedures to show them the way. The bureaucracy, any bureaucracy, is incapable of dealing with the noise of democracy, whether popular or republican or any other form. Bureaucracies simply have no flexibility.

Yes, I’m being generous in laying this off to bureaucracy and not anything else, but the point is valid in any event: despotism is even more inflexible, especially regarding things of which the despot disapproves.