Dear HN,
I've been following the Apple/FBI news very closely for the last month. I have free time to do it.
First we heard from Cyrus Vance (Manhattan DA) and FBI Director Comey. Then Attorney General Loretta Lynch was questioned during an oversight meeting on next year's DOJ budget. Now Obama has spoken at a major tech conference and expressed his desire to find some middle ground, which is essentially what the FBI and DOJ are seeking, a guaranteed entry (with a warrant) to phone data.
There's a lot to it, but I think one of the biggest issues is our commander in chief's perception of technologists. He thinks techies, on the whole, do not appreciate civil liberties. And honestly, based on what I read on HN and elsewhere, I'm not sure we all appreciate our civil servants for the good things they do. I am guilty of this too.
Regarding Obama, if you watch his speech at SXSW closely, at the end you can see how he feels he has a better idea about civil liberties than we do
I'll paraphrase a bit,
> "If everyone goes to their respective corners and the tech community says either we have strong perfect encryption, or else it's a big brother Orwellian world.... Then if something really bad happens... The politics will swing, it will be sloppy and rushed through Congress, and we really will lose some civil liberties, because the people who understand this best, and who care most about privacy and civil liberties, have sort of disengaged, or have taken a position that is not sustainable for the general public as a whole over time" [1]
This part is a direct quote:
> "the people who understand this best, and who care most about privacy and civil liberties"
I wonder, of whom is he thinking when he says this?
Hold that thought and check out what he said a few minutes earlier. He's struggling to speak and is almost tearing up,
> "I am way on the civil liberties side of this thing. Bill McRaven will tell you that I anguish a lot over the decisions we make in terms of how to keep this country safe, and I am not interested in overthrowing the values that have made us an exceptional and great nation simply for expediency" [2]
Obama thinks we do not respect civil liberties (and perhaps civil servants), and we think he does not respect us. For me, anyway, all his talk about the digital services team sounded really cool, but I also got the impression he views them more as a tool to solve broken government tech than as trusted advisors when balancing important issues concerning our civil liberties.
Who among us has not felt under appreciated in the workplace or at home?
I am also guilty of not appreciating our civil servants. I left the US to live abroad in part because I was fed up with hearing about patent trolls winning cases and destroying startups. I failed to appreciate all the things that had gone well before that time. Just yesterday I cast off another commenter when he suggested we remember that Obama did not overreact and raise the terror threat after the San Bernardino incident. But now I see that if I am to be respected, I must respect others. Seems simple doesn't it.
There is a deep distrust here and Obama, as great of a community leader he was in Illinois, is not bridging it effectively. We need to do it together, somehow.
I think if we start with this understanding of each other's perspective we can begin to make some progress.
I take Obama's remarks very seriously and I view the above as a threat to us all. He's essentially saying, if you don't make this work, we're going to pass an ugly law and you're not going to like it. It's exactly what Sensenbrenner said during the recent Congressional hearing on encryption [3], except Obama was much more eloquent.
Please continue discussing this on HN and share your views here, with your representatives, and with your friends and family, if you haven't already. It's so important to the future of our tech industry that we continue communicating with each other how we feel about these issues.
What can we do about this?
[1] https://youtu.be/wfsIZioIpdI?t=47m53s