While all of the focus, noise and fervor across the Country today are focused on tomorrow’s South Carolina GOP Presidential Pageant Primary and the Nevada Democrat Presidential Pageant Caucus, there is a much bigger story happening in the background. This story highlights why every US Citizen is a potential victim of the gross mismanagement and incompetence of our national government, in the theater of the “War on Terror”. What is this colossal story? It’s the story of a US Court and Apple, and the San Bernardino iPhone, and it exposes so much more that is wrong with security in the United States today.
The back story- On December 2, 2015 a devout moslem couple went to a company Christmas dinner in San Bernardino, CA and proceeded to murder 14 of our fellow Americans. The Minuteman’s Minute covered this in a previous post- https://4pba.com/devout-radicalized-yes-san-bernardino-proves-it/. The FBI is in possession of the iPhone of one of the “terrorist” and has now gone to the courts to force Apple to provide a “back-door” in to the iPhone. The immediate problem is that because of the design of the encryption technology that Apple employees on its mobile devices, there is no “back-door” program/technology that exist currently, according to Apple.
So, there are several questions that this situation begs to ask. Can the Courts legally compel a private company, Apple, to develop a new product or technology? If so, who would be responsible to pay for this development? And how long will it take Apple to develop this product/technology? And in consideration of these previous questions, what kind of “Pandora’s Box” does this open for the rest of Apple mobile device owners in the US? And in light of the basic corruption and/or incompetence of our national government, how long will it be before this product or technology will end up in the hands of others outside of the government who might use it for nefarious purposes?
This last question leads to what I believe is the real root questions and concerns for We The People, “Why didn’t the government prevent the circumstances that allowed the San Bernardino situation to happen in the first place? How was the supposedly ‘radicalized’ wife allowed to come in to the US to start with?” We know that the female half of this devout moslem couple was allowed to just walk right in to the US because she was the declared “wife to be” of the male terrorist. Really? Should this not raise a real BIG red flag for every US Citizen?
Our own government continually tells us that there is nothing to worry about concerning those practitioners of the “Religion of Peace” who are migrating in to the United States from moslem-majority countries. They tell US that there is a very stringent “vetting” process in place to assure US that anyone who is a potential terrorist could never get in to the Country through this process. Right. But in the San Bernardino case, the “wife” went through the existing legal immigration process and then with her “husband” proceeded to murder 14 fellow Americans. We find out in the aftermath that our own immigration officials told US that they didn’t even review the “wife’s” social media accounts so they didn’t potentially violate her “privacy”. What?
But we can be completely at ease that all of these immigrants, migrants and “refugees” from these moslem-majority countries will be fully vetted before they can come in to the Country? I don’t know about you, but I just don’t have ANY level of confidence that the same government bureaucrats, who couldn’t review the terrorist’s social media accounts to protect her privacy, will properly vet thousands of people on which they have no records to review. Do you share my concerns? This is even more concerning in light of how, now 10 weeks later, these employees of the same national government, are wanting to force Apple to jump through hoops that at this point don’t even exist, to retrieve information after the fact, that could open up the privacy of every US Citizen who has an Apple mobile device.
One last thing to note, most of these moslem immigrants, migrants and “refugees” don’t even have an iPhone. HEY LOOK, a shiny thing!!
God Bless America! And America, Please Bless God Again!