Daily Archives: 26 April 2016

Chimera

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The Justice Department said Friday it has withdrawn a request that sought a court order forcing Apple to assist in opening a locked iPhone 5s linked to a drug case in New York.

According to a court filing, the Justice Department no longer needs Apple’s assistance in unlocking the device because an individual provided investigators with the correct passcode Thursday.

This is yet another demonstration that DoJ didn’t need to dragoon a private enterprise into blowing up its own product—here hacking its encryption algorithm, to the detriment of its product and of its private citizen customers—for government convenience.  Government had the capability to get into the iPhone with its own resources.

This cracking, in fact, demonstrates two things: the first is that DoJ was cynically using the suits here and in the San Bernardino terrorism case solely for getting a court ruling that Government can force private enterprise to participate in Government searches, to destroy its own product, whenever Government takes a notion to demand it.

The other is that Government’s need for Apple’s help, which was Government’s claimed motive for its lawsuits against Apple, was a mirage.  On the contrary, these suits were nothing more than an execution of Government’s demand for control over private citizens’ personal data.

In each of the above cases, Government hacked the Apple phones’ encryption systems, encryption applied by the phone owners, not by Apple (Apple just made the capability available).  These hacks exposed weaknesses in Apple’s encryption algorithm.  In each of the above cases, Government has refused to tell Apple the nature of the weaknesses: the weaknesses are the backdoors into privately developed encryption algorithms that DoJ’s FBI Director James Comey has been demanding.

Minimum Wage Revisited

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Kevin Williamson, at National Review, had a thought that’s only now percolating to the surface of thinking Americans and that still is avoided by the American Left.

Properly understood, raising the minimum wage—and having a minimum wage at all—is camouflage, something to talk about and fight about while we’re not talking about and fighting about the more important underlying issue.  Declaring that all American workers shall be paid at least $15 an hour is not the same as ensuring that all American workers produce $15 an hour worth of value, and, eventually, the disconnect between those two considerations must make itself felt.

That part is well understood, and that’s a part that is deliberately ignored by the Left.  But there’s this, too.

Krugman, Clinton, Sanders, et al., have a backward and primitive view of government.  For them and for their fellow Hobbesians, the Middle Ages never really ended, and the role of the sovereign is to distribute benefices and issue decrees.  Unhappy with your wages?  Petition the prince to decree that they shall be otherwise, and dare any gimlet-eyed economist to point out that the imperial tailor is skimping on the ermine.

Yeah.  Minimum wage mandates are just an excuse for governing by fiat, for substituting rule by law for rule of law.

Williamson took a more gentle position on that; he suggested that it’s a lack of understanding by minimum wage proponents of the facts of economics and of human complexity.

I don’t think the leadership of the Left is that ignorant, or that naïve.  They know full well the facts of economics and of human complexity.  That’s why they carefully elide those things enroute to their rule by (Left’s) law: minimum wage mandates are a tool, not a goal.