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The FBI Says Its Fight With Apple Is Just About One Phone. Police and Prosecutors Say Otherwise

Mother Jones

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The war between Apple and the FBI over the iPhone used by Syed Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters, hinges mostly on one major question: Is the court order telling Apple to help the FBI unlock Farook’s iPhone an isolated case, or is it just the start of a new method for the government to guarantee access to anyone’s device?

Apple, which is fighting the order to unlock Farook’s phone, says complying with it would be just the tip of the iceberg. “The order would set a legal precedent that would expand the powers of the government, and we simply don’t know where that would lead us,” Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote in a letter to customers on Sunday. “Should the government be allowed to order us to create other capabilities for surveillance purposes, such as recording conversations or location tracking?” Privacy groups and most tech experts agree with Cook.

But the FBI insists no such thing will happen, saying it is only seeking access to Farook’s phone and no one else’s. “The San Bernardino litigation isn’t about trying to set a precedent or send any kind of message,” FBI Director James Comey wrote in a post responding to Cook on Lawfare, a prominent national security blog, on Sunday. “We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist’s passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a decade to guess correctly. That’s it. We don’t want to break anyone’s encryption or set a master key loose on the land.”

Yet high-profile supporters of the FBI’s case have said the precedent is what’s important. Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a prominent advocate for more law enforcement access to encrypted data, wrote in USA Today last week that “the iPhone precedent in San Bernardino is important for our courts and our ability to protect innocent Americans and enforce the rule of law. While the national security implications of this situation are significant, the outcome of this dispute will also have a drastic effect on criminal cases across the country.”

Comey and other law enforcement officials have repeatedly stressed how widespread they believe their encryption problem is. Both terrorists and criminals increasingly use encryption to communicate, they say, meaning the government’s ability to detect them and stop crimes or attacks is getting dramatically worse. And that problem extends well beyond big terrorism cases like San Bernardino and into everyday police work. “I’d say this problem…is actually overwhelmingly affecting law enforcement,” Comey told Burr’s committee last week, “because it affects cops and prosecutors and sheriffs and detectives trying to make murder cases, car accident cases, kidnapping cases, drug cases. It has an impact on our national security work, but overwhelmingly this is a problem that local law enforcement sees.”

Cyrus Vance Jr., the district attorney for the borough of Manhattan in New York City, often highlights how many cases are supposedly impossible to make because suspects use encryption—and said on Sunday he’d put the Apple precedent to more widespread use, forcing companies to help unlock the phones of suspects in the future. “As the encryption debate zeroes in on the cowardly terrorist acts committed in San Bernardino, we should also remember that Apple’s switch to default device encryption affects virtually all criminal investigations, the overwhelming majority of which are handled by state and local law enforcement,” he said last week in calling for Congress to pass a law mandating backdoors. Burr and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, have pledged to introduce such a bill in Congress.

State and local officials around the country back Vance. The Intercept compiled a collection of quotes from local law enforcement officials that run counter to Comey’s claim that the Apple case will provide only one-time access. As Matt Rokus, the deputy chief of the Eau Claire, Wisconsin, police put it, “The Apple case is going to have significant ramifications on us locally.”

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The FBI Says Its Fight With Apple Is Just About One Phone. Police and Prosecutors Say Otherwise

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Yes, Jeb Bush and Scott Walker Are Different Kinds of Conservatives

Mother Jones

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Jeb Bush may project a warmer, fuzzier, less hardnosed conservatism than Scott Walker, but is there really much difference between them? Greg Sargent isn’t so sure:

Here’s what I’ll be watching: How will this basic underlying difference, if it is real, manifest itself in actual policy terms? On immigration…both support eventual legalization only after the border is secured. Will their very real tonal difference show up in real policy differences?

On inequality, Walker may employ harsher rhetoric about the safety net than Bush does, but the evidence suggests that both are animated by the underlying worldview that one of the primary problems in American life is that we have too much government-engineered downward redistribution of wealth….Will Walker and Bush differentiate themselves from one another in economic policy terms in the least?

Ed Kilgore agrees:

The important thing is not assuming Bush and Walker represent anything new or different from each other just because they offer different theories of electability and different ways of talking to swing and base voters. Much of what has characterized all the recent intra-party “fights” within the GOP has reflected arguments over strategy and tactics rather than ideology and goals. I’d say there is a rebuttable presumption that will continue into the 2016 presidential contest.

You’d think that the way to get a grip on this question would be to look at the 2000 election. Jeb’s brother, George W. Bush, ran as a “compassionate conservative,” and during the campaign he even made good on that. Remember his criticism of a Republican proposal regarding the EITC: “I don’t think they ought to be balancing their budget on the backs of the poor”? Compassionate!

So how did that work out? Well, that’s the funny thing: it’s hard to say. Liberals tend to see Bush as a hardline conservative, but that’s mainly because of the Iraq War and Karl Rove’s hardball electoral tactics, which drove us crazy. Conservatives, by contrast, don’t believe he was really all that conservative at all. And I think they have a point. In fact, I made that case myself way back in 2006 in a review of Bruce Bartlett’s Imposter:

Bush may be a Republican—boy howdy, is he a Republican—but he’s not the fire-breathing ideologue of liberal legend.

Don’t believe it? Consider Bartlett’s review of Bush’s major domestic legislative accomplishments. He teamed up with Ted Kennedy to pass the No Child Left Behind Act, which increased education spending by over $20 billion and legislated a massive new federal intrusion into local schools. He co-opted Joe Lieberman’s proposal to create a gigantic new federal bureaucracy, the Department of Homeland Security. He has mostly abandoned free trade in favor of a hodgepodge of interest-group-pleasing tariffs. And after initially opposing it, Bush signed the Sarbanes-Oxley bill with almost pathetic eagerness in the wake of the Enron debacle, putting in place a phonebook-sized stack of new business regulations.

Want more? He signed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill, a bête noir of conservatives for years. His Medicare prescription-drug bill was the biggest new entitlement program since the Great Society. He initially put a hold on a wide range of last-minute executive orders from the Clinton administration, but after a few months of “study” allowed nearly all of them to stand. And he has increased domestic discretionary spending at a higher rate than any president since LBJ.

Obviously there’s more to Bush’s record than this—tax cuts, judicial appointments, the Iraq War, etc.—and he certainly counts as a conservative when you look at his entire tenure in office. The question is whether there’s a difference between his brand of conservatism and, say, Scott Walker’s or Ted Cruz’s. I’d say there is, and that there’s probably also a difference between Jeb Bush’s brand of conservatism and the harder-line folks represented by Walker, Cruz, Santorum, and others. Tonal shifts and tactical choices often turn into real differences in who gets appointed to various cabinet positions and which priorities a new president will set. Jeb Bush is obviously no liberal. But would he govern differently than Scott Walker? My guess is that he would.

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Yes, Jeb Bush and Scott Walker Are Different Kinds of Conservatives

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Chart: The Typical White Family Is 20 Times Wealthier Than the Typical Black Family

Mother Jones

We’re still posting a new chart on the current state of income inequality every day over the next week. Yesterday’s looked at how top tax rates dropped as top incomes rose.

Today, a closer look at how income inequality splits along racial lines. Whites’ average household income is 56 percent larger than that of African Americans and 39 percent larger than that of Hispanics. But the discrepancy is even greater when it comes to wealth: The median white family holds nearly 20 times more assets than he median black family and 74 times more assets than the median Hispanic family.

Source: Income by race: US Census; wealth by race: Edward N. Wolff

Illustrations and infographic design by Mattias Macklerâ&#128;&#139;

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Chart: The Typical White Family Is 20 Times Wealthier Than the Typical Black Family

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