For the third time in 3 years, I went to change my state drivers license and vehicle registration. (I've now held licenses in California, Texas (multiple), Florida, Illinois (multiple), South Carolina, Wisconsin, Maryland, West Virginia and Arizona.) To a certain extent, DMV comparisons may be apples to oranges because state policies and procedures change over time, and it may also be an artifact of the weekday and time I chose to register.. None of them were pleasant experiences, but it seemed that Arizona was more tolerable than the others. Why? In part, I could fill out paperwork in advance online, and I was in and out roughly out of the facility in just less than an hour. I was initially confused over where to check in; there's a sign to get a number. It turned out there was a clerk with her back to the entrance wall to the facility who gave out numbers. I had a barcode application with me and inferred I was supposed to use a kiosk near an entrance/exit.
California's was a sinkhole of time in multiple queues, but West Virginia was the biggest pain mostly because they were particularly anal-retentive about documentation for local residency. I had brought pieces of mail showing my local address, etc., but they were unusually specific and picky. I ended up having to go back and get a copy of my apartment lease and then they wanted to see things not listed on the apartment lease, easier said than done because my landlady wasn't necessarily present on the property during business hours. Each round trip was about 40 miles and I ended up making 3-4 round trips. Arizona has its quirks, too, particularly on documenting birth. I've been driving over 30 years; one would have thought that had been settled long ago. But I had known about it in advance--and I have a readily available passport, birth certificate, etc. They are also big on picture IDs, but beyond the passport and old drivers license, I have at least 3, probably 4 current work photo IDs.
Bill O'Reilly. Again. (9/22/16)
I often do one-offs on Bill O'Reilly and/or segments in my miscellany format, but he has a way of saying things, often peripheral to the basic theme, which really turn me off. (On a recent tweet I ad libbed that my dream job was to be a Fox News bloviator; this was an intentional shot at Bill O'Reilly.) Here's the latest excerpt:
Good luck with that, Mr. President. You'll remember Apple would not even help crack the San Bernardino killer's phone.First of all, the San Bernardino terrorist had multiple phones; his personal phone had been destroyed. The FBI wanted to break into his intact work cellphone. Now it's doubtful that work phones would have been used. For one thing, my work cellphone agreement specifically notes that there is no expectation of privacy, and I have a company-mandated monitoring app on the phone. Also, personal use is restricted to occasional use not increasing phone costs or interfering with work responsibilities. It seems common sense to me that the terrorist by using multiple phones for nefarious purposes would be increasing the risk of being caught. Let's point out that the FBI ALREADY had the phone history of both cellphones; they were looking for something, anything, je ne sais quoi ("I'll know it when I see it"). Why would the perpetrator go through the trouble of destroying his personal phone but not the job-related phone? He "forgot"? True, people sometimes do and/or forget boneheaded things, but it was highly unlikely that the FBI would find anything more promising than what they already had from the provider phone history. It was simply a matter of "due diligence"; they haven't reported on what they found on the phone (and they want to tell the public they went the extra mile to uncover every stone), but my money is on the likely finding that they found nothing usable. It was more a case of "government entitlement" without due process, nothing more than a glorified fishing expedition, a violation of the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable searches.
Second, O'Reilly misleads, probably due to his considerable ignorance of technology, what Apple did/didn't do. Apple sells phones that cost hundreds of dollars. People store valuable items on there, including things like credit card information. If a phone was easy to hack, nobody would buy it: who wants to be the victim of identity theft? If Apple effectively left the key under the doormat for the sole benefit of government, that the "good" police might need it one day, that security crack would soon be exploited by hackers. Apple had strengthened its product security so that hackers or other thieves couldn't break into phones with brute force methods, e.g., potentially millions of password guesses in blindingly fast succession. There are different approaches you can design to defeat brute force methods, which the FBI wanted to do with the terror suspect's phone: e.g., limit the number of guesses over a period of time and then locking it (temporarily) or wiping out all the phone data which leaves the hacker with nothing to exploit; the customer would need to reload sensitive phone data. Apple chose the implement the latter solution.
You shouldn't think of Apple as a kind of locksmith. If Apple maintained customer passwords, it would run the risk of a possible Snowden-type leak or a successful hacker attack. I wouldn't buy a cellphone with that type of risk. Now there are potential technical solutions to Apple's security design; at the risk of oversimplification, imagine, for instance, if you knew where Apple stored its counter triggering the cellphone locking/wiping functionality. You might simply reinitialize the counter after every attempt (easier said than done).
Some authoritarian political whores don't believe you have the right to defend your property/privacy against a corrupt, unaccountable government's "right to know"; for example, we have seen how the Obama Administration, for instance, has abused the IRS authority against its political opponents.
Former LP Presidential candidate McAfee effectively offered the FBI help finding the technical expertise to work around Apple's security features without crippling the product design itself. (I think at the time of the kerfuffle I Googled for technology vendors offering services to recover iPhone data). Now O'Reilly also doesn't understand that Apple is not a servant of the federal government and cannot be constitutionally conscripted to create a product or service for the sole benefit of government to circumvent its own product security features. The government could subcontract out the technical expertise that apparently the FBI lacks internally (which I believe it did) without trying to extort Apple via constitutional abuse of government authority into doing something against its customers' interests, which is a type of slavery.
Bill O'Reilly, of course, buys into the War on Terror propaganda, like many other neocons, and is willing to sacrifice your and others' liberty to corrupt, manipulative politicians or unaccountable bureaucrats. These morons don't understand even if they regulate Apple to implement a backdoor for corrupt bureaucrats to exploit there are other applications on Apple's operating system which essentially constitute a second layer of defense for sensitive data. The genie can't be put back into the bottle; demanding American software vendors compromise software security designs for the benefit of incompetent government bureaucrats basically provides foreign competitors an advantage in the marketplace and throws companies, investors, and employees under the bus.
Sometimes we have to deal with the limitations of the available data. Jesus, a highly literate man, didn't record His own words, independent of His disciples and followers. People who hide things or bury treasure don't necessarily leave a map, allowing others to exploit their riches. Murders remain unsolved with evidence discarded, say, in a large body of water, or in a degraded state. I'm sure that law enforcement would love to find Dear Diary where a terror suspect explained in detail his nefarious plots, suppliers, contacts, benefactors, with times, dates, locations, etc., but there is no universal law that a criminal or terrorist leaves an investigator-friendly map or detailed information of his unlawful actions. Compromising the liberty of others is no solution; it's a part of the problem. We fought a revolution over that principle.
