Daily Archives: 3 February 2017

The EO That Banned Muslim Entry into the US

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Or at least that’s what House and Senate Democrats, along with the NLMSM, claim President Donald Trump’s Executive Order does.  It’s certainly true that the EO suspends, for a time, entry from seven countries with predominantly Muslim populations: Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen.  Wow, that’s a lot.  That’s 199,200,000 Muslims.

However.  There is some small bit of information that’s carefully ignored by those Democrats with their badly manufactured tears and by the NLMSM.  The EO doesn’t touch some other predominantly Muslim nations; their ability to come and go into the United States is deliberately left untouched.

Minor nations like Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, The People’s Republic of China, Malaysia, Russia, Niger, Philippines.  And on and on.  Globally, there are roughly 1,700,000,000 Muslims.

That terrible order that’s targeted at the terrorist or terrorism-sponsoring seven that ex-President Barack Obama (D) himself designated as terrorist or terrorism-sponsoring affect a small minority of Muslims and it does that much solely as a side effect of the effort to keep out terrorists.

Security Holes

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Recall the hoo-raw over Apple’s refusal to help the FBI hack an iPhone used by the San Bernardino terrorists, the FBI’s claim that they couldn’t get into the iPhone without Apple’s help, and then the FBI’s successful penetration of the iPhone from hiring a third party to do hack it.  Recall further the FBI’s subsequent refusal to tell Apple about the security hole in Apple’s iPhone software (supposedly limited to the generation of cell phone used by the terrorists) that was exploited by the hack and the FBI’s associated refusal to tell Apple how the hack itself worked.

The FBI has been in court defending those refusals.

…the Justice Department argued that the information it withheld, if released, could be seized upon by “hostile entities” who could develop their own “countermeasures”….

This is curious logic, indeed.  The FBI is leaving the security hole in place on the assumption, apparently, that hackers can’t already identify the hole and exploit it—as that third party did so promptly after being hired by the FBI.  So, leave the hole unplugged; a countermeasure would just be found by hackers.

Never mind that any hack—all of them to date, against any software in any milieu, as well as any future hack—is a countermeasure against the software being penetrated.  There’s nothing static about any of this; software security and hacks are in a dynamic arms race.  It’s foolish to leave existing holes in place in the expectation that the arms race will stop.