Liberty Guard
  • Projects
  • About
  • Leadership
  • Podcast
  • Blog
    • From The Desk of Bob Barr
    • Liberty Updates
    • Media Appearances
    • All Articles
  • Videos
  • Contact
  • Join
DONATE
Wednesday, July 9, 2025
Liberty Guard
  • Projects
  • About
  • Leadership
  • Podcast
  • Blog
    • From The Desk of Bob Barr
    • Liberty Updates
    • Media Appearances
    • All Articles
  • Videos
  • Contact
  • Join
DONATE
Liberty Guard
Liberty Guard
  • Projects
  • About
  • Leadership
  • Podcast
  • Blog
    • From The Desk of Bob Barr
    • Liberty Updates
    • Media Appearances
    • All Articles
  • Videos
  • Contact
  • Join
Tag:

FBI

BlogFrom the Desk of Bob Barr

Government Case Against Apple is “Pure Applesauce”

by lgadmin March 2, 2016
written by lgadmin

“The Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.” These were not the words of a radical social justice warrior from “Black Lives Matter,” or even a liberal Democrat in Congress. They were the deliberate and percipient observations from one of the most substantive and constitutionally faithful of Supreme Court Justices  — the late Antonin Scalia.

The tragedy of Scalia’s untimely passing is amplified by the need for voices such as his in the current fight between iPhone manufacturer Apple and the federal government, over forced access to an encrypted phone belonging to one of the dead San Bernardino terrorists. The government claims its demand that Apple break into the phone by overriding the built-in privacy protections is “reasonable” and necessary in order to protect national security. Apple maintains what Uncle Sam demands is not reasonable; and would establish a precedent that would result in harm to the company, its millions of customers, other U.S. manufacturers of “smart phones,” and ultimately the U.S. government. One can almost hear Scalia’s voice calling the government’s case against Apple, “pure applesauce.”

Before digging deeper into the government’s current dust-up with Apple, it is important to note that this fight is nothing new; it is simply the latest chapter in a decades-long push by Uncle Sam to gain access to Americans’ digital technology and place this booming sector of our economy under its thumb.

In 1994, for example, Congress passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA); which for the first time forced telecommunication carriers and manufacturers to deliberately modify their communications platforms and hardware for the sole purpose of facilitating the government’s ability to surreptitiously monitor communications made over those networks. The government (in particular the FBI), not satisfied by merely having a “back door” built into digital communication platforms for its convenience, also pushed Congress for legislation that would force private companies to provide encryption “keys” so that, if necessary, it always has a way to access the data on those networks. In those pre-911 days, Congress resisted such unnecessary and improper power grabs.

What makes the current debate with Apple different and more alarming, is that the government is for the first time demanding that a company actually invent a way to defeat the very encryption safeguards it builds into the devices it sells. Attorney General Lynch has taken to citing an obscure law, the All Writs Act of 1789, to justify this unprecedented exercise of power to compel companies to do the government’s work for it.

The debate over Apple’s reluctance to cooperate with government demands has to some degree been intentionally obfuscated in a swirl of techno-jargon about “encryption keys,” “brute force access,” and “backdoors.” Although these may be accurate details about the technical aspects of the debate, they have little relevance to the more important policy and constitutional impact of what is at stake. The question is not whether Apple can break its encryption; it could. Rather, the singularly important question is whether it should. And, the eventual answer to this inquiry will be a watershed moment for personal privacy in the digital age.

Since the government views providing access to data – even more than the data itself — as a duty no private citizen or company should have the power to resist, the feds characterize the current debate as a “minor” technicality. This is why it portrays Apple’s opposition to what it describes as a one-time-only solution to breaking the encryption on a single iPhone, as unpatriotic and shortsighted. Apple, and many Americans for that matter, view the government’s demands as something far broader and more important than a single, technical-assistance request in a single criminal investigation.

The true value of Apple’s encryption is that, as a manufacturer, it does not compromise its integrity for any reason. That’s the shield. As soon as they do it once, the shield is pierced and is made worthless, and there is nothing to stop others, including governments, from demanding access based on lessening degrees of “extraordinary circumstances.” One need only look to the USA PATRIOT Act, which frequently is employed but only rarely for terrorism investigations, to see this maxim in action.

Subsequent demands to access encrypted data will come not just from the U.S. government, either. Russia, China, and any foreign country willing to act as a proxy will not hesitate to use this precedent to search the phones of American business executives they suspect of “spying,” or some other fabricated offense – for the sole purpose of using the data it gathers to its economic, military or internal security benefit. Furthermore, the technology used to defeat security will not remain a secret for long; it will be only a short time before private, non-state actors coopt the anti-security measures for hacking private data.

This is precisely why the Apple debate is not just about one dead terrorist’s phone; the precedent set here will impact anyone who shares information digitally.

The good news is that, initially, a lower court has looked with suspicion at not just how the government is rationalizing its authority, but to what it inevitably would lead. “In a world in which so many devices, not just smartphones, will be connected to the Internet of Things,” writes U.S. Magistrate Judge James Orenstein, “the government’s theory that a licensing agreement allows it to compel the manufacturers of such products to help it surveil the products’ users will result in a virtually limitless expansion of the government’s legal authority to surreptitiously intrude on personal privacy.”

Unfortunately, Judge Orenstein’s correct analysis is being shouted down by government lawyers, political candidates, and most mainstream media outlets, more concerned with playing on fear of terrorism than with protecting individuals against Big Brother’s insatiable thirst for power and information.

Originally published here via townhall.com

March 2, 2016 0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
From the Desk of Bob Barr

21st Century Technology And Government Power Put Orwell’s “Thought Police” To Shame

by Liberty Guard Author November 19, 2014
written by Liberty Guard Author

“Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever,” George Orwell wrote in 1984, describing the “Newspeak” term for any crime that was evidence of disloyalty. “You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.” Though written more than six decades ago in 1949, Orwell’s dystopian fiction has been hauntingly prophetic in its accuracy describing the nature of totalitarian societies, particularly the frightening methods for exacting control over the population.

Orwell’s omnipresent “Thought Police,” who penetrated every facet of civilian life, were replicated for decades until the fall of the Berlin Wall by the feared East German “Stasi”; and until the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, by the KGB. Russian citizens today, under Vladimir Putin, himself a former KGB official, reportedly suffer similar “Big Brother-ism.”

Even in the United States, we see eerie similarities developing within and among the myriad federal agencies that are either directly or indirectly involved in gathering, processing, disseminating, and data-basing information on and about the citizenry. This is no longer a concern that should be directed only at those agencies historically tasked with such activities – the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA primarily. Virtually every federal agency has now become part of the problem.

The Transportation Safety Administration employs “behavior detection officers” to scan facial expressions in order to identify would-be terrorists. DNA is harvested at roadblocks on public highways. The US Postal Service conducts hundreds of thousands of “mail covers” each year, “come rain, shine or dead of night.”

But it is the arena of electronic communications data gathering that has provided the most abundant – and scary – harvest of personal information a la George Orwell.

Owing largely to the actions of Edward Snowden and reporter Glenn Greenwald, we know that any digital communication in which a person participates can be, and likely is, recorded, stored and analyzed by the NSA. The Department of Justice even uses fake cell phone towers on Cessna airplanesto surreptitiously collect cell phone data from American citizens.

Last weekend, however, America moved yet another step closer to fulfilling Orwell’s vision for the future under a totalitarian state as the New York Times revealed that a disturbing number of federal agencies are now using costly, and largely unsupervised, “undercover” investigations to conduct surveillance. These “Secret Police” pose as “business people, welfare recipients, political protesters and even doctors or ministers” in order to catch suspects, or whomever else may fall within the ever-expanding registry of federal criminal offenses (now approaching 5,000 in number).

For years privacy advocates have warned about the steady expansion of virtually unchecked powers both granted to, and assumed by, federal law enforcement and clandestine services agencies. The situation is made far worse by virtue of the fact that many of these activities now are undertaken “in the shadows,” with minimal or no real oversight by the President, agency heads or even congressional overseers. The agencies thus are left largely free to carry on as nearly autonomous entities, guided only by the vague, if not meaningless principle, that they are “protecting us” — whatever the financial or legal costs.

Since the 9/11 attacks, the notion of “Saving America” is now more of a rote mantra used to justify whatever actions government agencies or individual employees decide to undertake so long as such actions can be shoe-horned into the box labeled “homeland security.” The mammoth mechanism of the federal government has transmogrified from an entity designed to protect liberty, into an opaque and self-justifying Praetorian Guard made almost impenetrable to the citizenry through the double-edged sword of modern technology.

This now-galloping mission creep once was relegated primarily to the major federal law enforcement and spy agencies. No longer is this the case. Last weekend’s New York Times revelations illustrates clearly how this toxic mentality has infected virtually every facet of the federal government. Like financial institutions that believed themselves “too big to fail,” the federal government now considers itself “too important to restrain.” Each department, agency, or office has a mission it considers absolutely essential to protecting America from crime, corruption and terrorism — where even discussion about limits to their extra-legal exploits is taboo.

The tangible threats posed by this paradigm are fundamental and widespread. If someone with the I.R.S. can pose as an attorney to catch criminals, how are citizens supposed to trust in the integrity of the right to defend themselves against government charges? If a special agent with the FBI can pretend to be an AP reporter, is any media product free from suspicion? And, if an employee of the DEA can steal content and photos from citizens to use in sting operations, how are we to trust that even our friends’ and family’s online communications are not the product of government snoops?

“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment,” Orwell wrote 65 years ago.“You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.” Sadly, the ubiquity of home computers, smart phones, iPads, and other information-sharing devices – all susceptible to government GPS tracking – have make Orwell’s society, in which at least the dark of night provided some relief from government’s prying eyes and ears, a quaint relic of a bygone day.

 

November 19, 2014 0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
From the Desk of Bob Barr

Government’s Demand For Data Truly Is Insatiable

by Liberty Guard Author October 1, 2014
written by Liberty Guard Author

The launch of the new iPhone 6 late last month set a record for Apple, selling 10-million units in the first three days. In spite of the record-setting sales, it was not long before consumer enthusiasm for the new technology dulled with reports of alleged problems, including a potential for bending if sat on for long periods; a phenomenon quickly dubbed “Bendgate.” The release of the iPhone 6 presented another, more serious problem for a much different demographic: government snoops.

Rather than continuing to be the rope in a tug-of-war between consumer privacy and warrantless government requests for consumer data, Apple smartly took itself out of the game altogether. The techno-giant did this through its new iOS 8 operating system which Apple claims makes it not “technically feasible for [Apple] to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices.” Not surprisingly, Apple’s movedid not sit well with government officials who not only see surreptitious surveillance as their duty, but a right no citizen should have the power to impede.

The surge in technological innovation over the last few years has raised the stakes in this fight, highlighted by the recent Supreme Court rulingRiley v. California in which the Justices clearly noted the differences in searching paper files versus digital data. However, the federal government’s efforts to undermine the development and use of devices or programs (such as encryption keys) that protect citizens’ communications against government snooping, goes back more than two decades.

In 1994, for example, Congress passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which forces telecommunication carriers and manufacturers to modify their digital communications platforms and hardware in order to facilitate the government’s ability to surreptitiously monitor communications made over those networks. The original version of CALEA, which pertained primarily to telephone communications, was expanded in 2004 to include internet traffic and VoIP services. Even this did not slake the government’s thirst for access to information.

In 2012, the FBI began pushing for even greater access to even more digital technology — messaging services and email — complaining that it was “going dark” because rapidly-advancing technology was making it too difficult for its agents to conduct electronic surveillance. Like CALEA, technology companies would be forced to build “back doors” into programing code to facilitate electronic eavesdropping; failure to comply with the rules would result in $25,000 per-day fines. The Obama administration strongly backed these new rules, but plans to present legislation to Congress were delayed after blowback from the Snowden-NSA revelations; still, the “going dark” mantra is repeated regularly by FBI officials.

Concerns with the current and proposed rules regarding access to digital data go beyond personal privacy. Infrastructure modification requirements — either to existing networks or to those being built — come with a residual price tag and compliance costs that consumers ultimately will bear. Moreover, as the Electronic Freedom Foundation notes, these rules give the FBI and other federal agencies “veto power over proposed innovations to the Internet in order to make spying easier.”

Not content to limit their efforts to legislation, the Feds also continue behind-the-scenes efforts to undermine methods of encryption as well as the ability of private citizens or companies to be able to encrypt their communications against the government.

Last September, ProPublica and the New York Times released a damning report about the NSA’s multi-billion dollar, decades-long war on private encryption. According to the article, based on more of Edward Snowden’s leaked documents, the NSA “deployed custom-built, superfast computers to break codes, and began collaborating with technology companies in the United States and abroad to build entry points into their products,” thereby making private encryption effectively useless at keeping the prying eyes of government out of digital communications. In fact, this has long been a goal of federal law enforcement agencies going back to at least 1994, when Uncle Sam proposed mandating use of the “Clipper Chip” to override private encryption. This illustrates clearly that no matter how much information government gains, it always seeks more.

The implications of the debate are far-reaching, especially as technology continues to advance, and the value of digital information transmitted across the communication spectrum increases. The leak of private photos of celebrities is but the latest example of how data security is intimately tied to personal privacy rights. Allowing government unfettered access to any data stored or transmitted digitally, which is its ultimate goal, permanently surrenders control of this information to anyone with this “back door” access – good guys, bad guys or simple voyeurs.

This is precisely what Ayn Rand foresaw and understood when she said more than half a century ago, “When you take away a man’s privacy, you gain the power to control him absolutely.” She saw the future and it is here.

October 1, 2014 0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail

Keep in touch

Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Telegram

Search Archives

Recent Posts

  • A European, Socialized Pharmaceutical Marketplace Should Have No Place in America

    May 9, 2025
  • Bob joins NTD News

    March 27, 2025
  • Government Over-Regulation Is Handing China The Energy Future

    March 19, 2025
  • The Climate Control Movement In Europe Is Alive and Still Kicking

    March 6, 2025
  • The Regulatory State Continues to Target Fantasy Sports

    February 27, 2025

About Us

  • Liberty Guard
    3330 Cumberland Blvd.
    Suite 500
    Atlanta, Georgia 30339
  • Email: [email protected]

From The Desk of Bob Barr

A European, Socialized Pharmaceutical Marketplace Should Have No Place in America
Government Over-Regulation Is Handing China The Energy Future
The Climate Control Movement In Europe Is Alive and Still Kicking

Latest Videos

Not My Fingerprints
Idiots In Full View
Biden Administration Champions Stupid Idea

Get Liberty Guard Email Updates




©2024 Liberty Guard, Inc. All rights reserved.

Designed and Developed by Media Bridge LLC

Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Telegram
  • Refund and Data Policies
  • State Disclosures
  • Join
Liberty Guard
  • Projects
  • About
  • Leadership
  • Podcast
  • Blog
    • From The Desk of Bob Barr
    • Liberty Updates
    • Media Appearances
    • All Articles
  • Videos
  • Contact
  • Join