Apple for the day

The New York Times has an article by Farhad Manjoo and Mike Issac about Apple:

Mike: Hey, hey, Farhad! We’re just coming off our annual Times tech reporter summit in San Francisco this week, and I’m pumped! There’s nothing like Dean Baquet catching me in a trust fall to make me believe in teamwork.
Farhad: Let’s not lie to our readers, Mike. He didn’t catch you. We weren’t even doing a trust fall. I hope you got some medical attention for those bruises.
Mike: The aspirin is kicking in. So, on with the news:
It looks like Zynga, the social gaming company, is selling its headquarters, which at this point I imagine consists mostly of the chaff of empty Farmville fields. The Eero, a wi-fi router, is supposed to be incredibly fast, simple, and easy to use, except for taking the difficult first step of actually paying five hundred bucks for a three-pack of wi-fi routers.
Speaking of wi-fi, earlier in the month American Airlines decided to sue Gogo, its in-flight wi-fi provider, for generally being the opposite of incredibly fast, simple, and easy to use. On Monday, however, American Airlines dropped the suit. I assume it was all some elaborate legal chess game, but it was nice to have my wi-fi experiences vindicated publicly, however briefly.
Farhad: Oh, also, Facebook finally rolled out the emoji reactions that it has been chatting up for some time as an evolution of the Like button. There are now icons for “love”, “ha-ha”, “wow”, “sad”, and “angry.” How does that make you feel, Mike?
Mike: Is there a reaction for “generally apathetic at a feature that has received far too much press for what it is”? Because I would use that emoji.
But what I want to get to is what we’ve all been thinking about and talking about in tech for the last two weeks: Apple versus the FBI. I think it’s safe to say that, at this point, it will probably be the biggest tech story of the next few years, if not the decade, and it is all playing out in public in gory detail.
To recap: The FBI essentially wants Apple to help crack open an iPhone used by one of the shooters in the rampage in San Bernardino, California that ended with the deaths of fourteen people last year. The way the FBI wants Apple to do that is by writing some new software that bypasses a bunch of safeguards Apple created to help consumers’ phones stay safe in the first place. That is a thing that, for many reasons, Apple does not want to do. The whole thing is fascinating, as it cuts to the heart of so many issues in a rapidly changing age of new technologies, one in which we must decide the balance between our personal right to privacy and digital liberties, and the authority of the government to seek out information in the name of national security. But, while I imagine it will take quite some time for the courts to pass judgment, I’m already seeing some fairly clear lines in the sand being drawn. As a token tech reporter living and working in New York City, the questions that most normal, non-techies have been asking me is: “Why doesn’t Apple care about finding the terrorists? Why is the company acting so anti-American?” That’s starkly different than what I hear from most people in our industry, but I’d love to hear your take on it and what you’re hearing from people on the West Coast.
Farhad: Maybe it’s just my sun-soaked California attitude, but to me Apple’s stand here makes sense. If it loses, it would be a very big deal.
One thing that’s clear is that we are not talking about just one phone. This is a test case. If the FBI wins, it has a collection of other phones it would like Apple to unlock for it. The Manhattan district attorney has a lot more. I suspect many other DAs will be lining up for this service as well. There’s a good chance that most of these cases will not be about terrorism; they’ll be about more routine investigations that do not make headlines.
So, as I argued in a column this week, what we really should be discussing is the precedent this case sets. We are now surrounded by tech devices that contain all our secrets and that can be set to record and monitor us from afar. As we’ve seen often in the last couple of years, police powers can be abused. So, before we force a tech company to break open its security to grant the cops access to a trove of data, it seems wise to have a debate about whether we want any limits on those powers.
For instance, should a court be able to compel access to a smartphone for any law-enforcement aim? What about drug crimes? What about immigration enforcement? After all, several presidential candidates have endorsed rounding up undocumented immigrants for deportation. Or look at Ferguson, Missouri, where riots erupted in 2014 after a police officer killed a teenager named Michael Brown. The Justice Department found that Ferguson’s police and courts were routinely stopping, searching, and issuing arrest warrants for the city’s black citizens. Should those authorities be allowed to search through people’s smartphones, too? These questions make me really queasy. What about you?
Mike: I mean, I’m always queasy, but that’s because I’ve had a lot of burritos on this last trip back from San Francisco. Seriously, though, of course, all those things make me nervous. Do I want the government to access my text messages with you? Man, that would look bad. Here’s the thing, though: a year or so ago, Apple took the deliberate step of making it so it could not gain access its own phones at the behest of the government, and it is only accelerating that effort. I’ve already reported they’re going to take similar steps with iCloud and generally embrace this approach overall. That’s different than Apple’s history of complying with government requests for data when it is legally required to do so. So, when the company bound its own hands, I have to ask: what did it expect the government to do, just sit back and say, “oh, well, I guess we won’t request any more data.” Of course not. This is an escalation in a continuing war for reach into consumer data, and now it’s going to court.
I think, in general, people don’t want the government snooping their data. However, I think this is perhaps the absolute worst case Apple and others chose to push back on, considering that it includes questions of terrorism and the mass slaughter of innocents. Tracking down terrorist ties to murderers is far easier for normal, non-techie people to comprehend than the intricacies of software and data extraction.
Anyway, I expect this will continue on into our next set of trust falls in 2017. Till then, I’ll continue to nurse my bruises and watch the case.
Farhad: You’re right, the FBI picked the perfect case for pushing for this authority. We are in for interesting times.

Rico says that Farhad Manjoo is definitely a name to conjure with, but the Feebs can't be looking for the San Bernadino terrorists; they're in the morgue...