Category Archives: culture

Another Thought on Encryption

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Apple’s Tim Cook had one [emphasis added].

On your iPhone, there’s likely health information, there’s financial information. There are intimate conversations with your family or your co-workers. There’s probably business secrets, and you should have the ability to protect it. And the only way we know how to do that is to encrypt it. Why is that? It’s because, if there’s a way to get in, then somebody will find the way in. There have been people that suggest that we should have a back door. But the reality is, if you put a back door in, that back door’s for everybody, for good guys and bad guys.

The Democrat District Attorney for Manhattan Cyrus Vance thinks Government should be in our pockets; he thinks Apple, et al., are undermining Government power.

IPhones are now the first consumer products in American history that are beyond the reach of lawful warrants. The result is crimes go unsolved and victims are left beyond the protection of law. Because Apple is unwilling to help solve this problem, the time for a national, legislative solution is now.

Here’s what our Constitution’s 3rd Amendment says:

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner….

Vance just wants to skirt this by quartering virtual policemen in our cell phones. No. Government just needs to go back to doing actual police work, and not rely on such quartering.

Undermining? If anyone is undermining anything, it’s the New York Democrat, who’s undermining individual liberty. This is a clear and present demonstration of why Government cannot be trusted with such a weapon.

Encryption and Backdoors

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Senator Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) wants (this is old news) a means for Government to read our private communications, most especially those we’ve chosen to encrypt. She wants Government to be able to penetrate that encryption, via, perhaps, a backdoor.

I think that Silicon Valley has to take a look at their products. [I]f you create a product that allows evil monsters to communicate in this way,…that is a big problem.

They have apps to communicate on, which cannot be pierced even with a court order[.]

On the one hand, perhaps hammers and screwdrivers should be Government controlled—they get used by evil monsters to commit mayhem.

Perhaps guns should be Government controlled—oh, wait….

Then, there’s this:

A major breach at computer network company Juniper Networks has US officials worried that hackers working for a foreign government were able to spy on the encrypted communications of the US government and private companies for the past three years.

The FBI is investigating the breach, which involved hackers installing a back door on computer equipment, US officials told CNN.

Yet, Government, folks like Feinstein who should know better and others who are simply pandering, wants a deliberate backdoor inserted into our private communications.

I’ll say it again. There is no safety without intact individual liberty.

“Lynch” is a Bad Word?

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Precious snowflakes at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania want the school to rename the school’s Lynch Memorial Hall. The word “lynch” is racist, you see.

Never mind that Clyde Lynch, for whom the building was named was the President of the college for 18 years.

So, should our Attorney General change her name, too? After all, it seems that the very names, when disapproved by a special few, are perforce racist. And she’s in a position to do the hanging.

No Fly Lists and Guns

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President Barack Obama said in his Oval Office speech Sunday evening that it’s insane to let people on the DHS No Fly List have access to guns. Obama also said that it’s wrong to operate on the basis of suspicion and hate.

While folks on the No Fly list aren’t necessarily objects of hatred, they are targets of suspicion. But that’s all they are. They’ve done nothing, and they’ve not been convicted for anything—other than of being objects of suspicion. Stephen Hayes was on the No Fly list; he’s a target of suspicion solely because he’s an Evil Conservative and an Evil Journalist. DHS employees are on the No Fly list. They’re targets of suspicion because…? Then-Senator Ted Kennedy (D, MA) was on the No Fly list. Say, what?

What none of these suspicious persons have been through, though, is Due Process. Not being able to fly into the US does not block them from entering the US; it just inconveniences them: they have to travel via other means. Not being able to have access to firearms is more than an inconvenience, regardless of one’s view of gun control. That denial is a blanket denial of one’s access to one’s Constitutional rights, and that requires a due process proceeding first.

What’s insane is denial of due process, of violating the law, whenever that becomes inconvenient. What’s insane is operating on suspicion rather than the law. What’s insane is decrying operating on suspicion while operating on the suspicion of a government List.

Private Property Rights and Asteroid Mining

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The US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (the Space Act), which President Barack Obama signed shortly before Thanksgiving, acknowledges certain critical things regarding private enterprise and solar system resources. One of those critical things is this:

Any asteroid resources obtained in outer space are the property of the entity that obtained them, which shall be entitled to all property rights to them, consistent with applicable federal law and existing international obligations.

Naturally, others who lack the capacity to reach the asteroids (our own capacity, so far, is limited; the law was enacted in the expectation that our capacity would expand in the reasonably nearby future), demur from our new law: it violates international law, they claim. Sa’id Mosteshar, a Board Member of the London Institute of Space Policy and Law, is one such:

It is my opinion that any US entity obtaining asteroid resources would be in contravention of international law, as would the government for permitting it. The Treaties governing space activities do not give the US that right, and the US government cannot assign to its citizens rights that it does not have.

Indeed, he argues that the asteroids are

not subject to national appropriation.

Mosteshar is right, but he plainly doesn’t understand how wrong that makes him.

It isn’t government enterprise that would be doing the exploration and exploitation governed by the Space Act. It’s private enterprise.

We’ve understood since Locke articulated the concept all that time ago that governments don’t have rights to give or withhold. Already endowed in each individual one of us by dint of our existence is a set of rights. We then grant certain lesser rights, authorities, and privileges to our governments in order that those governments can do what they were created to do: protect those larger rights that are our endowment.

One of those rights is our property in our own bodies and the ownership that gives us—each of us as individuals—in the fruits of our labor. Hence Mosteshar’s correctness, which makes him so wrong. Private property rights are not governments’ to give; of course, the US government cannot assign to its citizens that right: we already have it. Private enterprise exploration and exploitation are not subject to national appropriation because it isn’t national at all: it’s…private. Private exploration and exploitation of off-Earth resources—the asteroids, for instance—in no way establishes a national claim on those resources or the results of their exploitation. It just obligates the nation to move to protect those private property rights, held by its citizens, against interference by others.