Daily Archives: 25 April 2016

OPM

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The FBI paid a non-governmental third party over $1 million for technology that allowed the agency to unlock an iPhone 5C that belonged to San Bernardino gunman Syed Farook, according to a remark made by FBI director James Comey at a moderated discussion in London on Thursday.

And

The bureau’s top official added that the purchase of third party tools for the purpose of unlocking encrypted devices is not the preferred road the FBI would like to travel in investigating crimes and terrorism cases.

Of course not.  The FBI would prefer to use OPM to pay for such invasions, in this case Apple’s money to pay for forcing Apple to destroy its own customer-desired and -centered encryption.  Then Comey added in wide-eyed innocence,

I’m hoping that we can somehow get to a place where we have a sensible solution, or set of solutions, that doesn’t involve hacking and doesn’t involve spending tons of money in a way that’s unscalable[.]

That sensible solution includes no back-door, government-mandated accesses to encryption, which Comey has demanded earlier as part of his “sensible” solution.  He’s declined to explain how such backdoors don’t expose American citizens to government snooping and abuse, other than to say, “Trust us.”  He’s declined to explain, in any fashion, how such backdoors don’t expose American citizens to hacking by criminals and other nefarious types.

No, this push to use OPM for gaining entry is just another bit of government disingenuosity.

Saviors

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Don Boudreaux, at Cafe Hayek, had some thoughts on this sort of folk.  Here’s one:

Saviors need victims who need saving.  And if such victims are not real and readily available, the saviors conjure them up by convincing themselves that this or that group of people are helpless victims eager to be raised from the muck of their misfortunes by the saviors.  Sometimes the saviors convince even the groups they seek to save that they—the members of these groups—are indeed mired in a muck from which they can be extracted only by the saviors.

This much is true, but I think Boudreaux missed a couple of other characteristics of these saviors.

One is that these become addicted to their saviorism: the addiction of needing victims is the saviors‘ desperate need for the ego rush of their helping, whether that help is real or a figment of the pseudo-benefactor’s imagination.  This sort of savior cannot get along without the dependency of others on their own largesse.

The other missed characteristic is pure, raw power.  That dependency of other on these ones’ handouts is, for these, nothing more than an enhancement of their own personal power, whether political, economic, or social.  The dependent ones represent votes, or tools for gathering donations from third parties (a significant fraction of which goes to “overhead”), or prestige among peers and credulous acquaintances and strangers.

One way by which we readily can discriminate such saviors from legitimate benefactors is the nature of the benefaction.  The latter offers hands up, temporary aid, means by which the beneficiary can get back on his own feet and become/resume independence and personal responsibility.  The former gives handouts, which serve only to maintain the “beneficiary’s” dependency on his savior.