Heh, if only someone could have predicted this?

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/02/hey_seattle_hows_that_15_minimum_wage_working_out_for_ya.html

http://karendecoster.com/the-collapse-of-gender-sanity.html

Bullet-sharing app off to a successful start.

Anti-terrorism funding to NYC slashed because Chuck Schumer went off the reservation. Loyalty to the tribe is the only thing that matters.

Is it time to short Twitter?

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=231145

More fun and games in the VA:

The list of VA employees with unusual workplace moving patterns includes infamous names like Diana Rubens, who was a D.C. based administrator until she created a job for herself with less work and the same $181,000 salary near her family in Philadelphia. Then she billed VA for nearly $300,000 in relocation costs.

http://dailycaller.com/2016/02/21/interactive-take-a-ride-on-vas-bad-bosses-merry-go-round/#ixzz40v2AjfLS

Did she have her entire house moved?

Apple, the FBI, encryption and CLIPPER:

Remember folks, the salient point is that The FBI can recover the data on this device, as it is in their physical possession, lacks a hardware key store and is running an older, less-secure operating system. In other words I continue to maintain that they are lying about their inability to do so. They do not need Apple's cooperation as this is a previous-generation device and operating system.

The problem is that if the precedent is set that the manufacturer must "open" their devices then it effectively, and soon will literally, become illegal to design, build and sell devices that are hardened to a sufficient degree that they cannot be hacked in this fashion -- a capability that once present cannot be confined to either the manufacturer or only "legitimate" government requests and agencies, and thus will be used to steal not only personal and corporate data but to infiltrate and steal secret government information as well.

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=231146

Darth, that's an excellent summary of the issue. I figure there are two possibilities: if it's crackable, then the NSA has probably already done it, and the government is only pursuing the case to make a point and set legal precedents. If the NSA hasn't been able to crack it, then it's really unlikely that Apple will be able to.

A lot of people commenting on this issue assume that Apple has a master key, and they are just obstinately refusing to do it. I'm pretty sure they do not have such a key, for the exact reason that escrowed encryption is a bad idea: once the master key is leaked (and it will be; it's so valuable that someone with access will give in to temptation eventually), the entire thing becomes worthless. What's happening instead is that Apple is being commanded to write cracking software. Depending on the encryption algorithm they used and how the keys are managed, I'm not even sure that's possible.

Even if it is, the fact remains that the court is demanding that Apple expend its own labor to satisfy the demands of law enforcement. Here's the analogy I'm using: You're a locksmith. Government comes to you with a court order demanding that you make a skeleton key, that it can use to open a lock that it wants opened. You must do this at your own expense. Further, they key you must build can open not only the lock the government wants opened, but also any other lock of the same type anywhere in town. And once you have done this, you must give the key to the government. Of course, once the government has that key, all locks of that type become less valuable, which is too bad for you if that's a type of lock that you sell. Consider: if the government can demand that you do this, then it can demand that you do absolutely anything, as long as it can cob up a law-enforcement pretense for needing it.

Here's some things about the math behind encryption. There are two basic approaches to cracking encrypted data. The brute-force method is to simply guess keys until what comes out is what you expect. This will always work eventually (with one exception), but "eventually" can be a very long time, centuries or more, depending on how many possible key values there are. The other method is the cryptanalysis method, where you study the algorithm and try to find a weakness in it, such that either examining the data reveals the key, or you can greatly reduce the set of possible key values that contains the correct key. (If you remember the Wireless Encryption Protocol that was used on the early wireless networks, it fell to a cryptanalysis attack. A weakness in the algorithm was revealed that made it easy to write a program that can guess the correct network key within a few minutes.)

Until fairly recently, the most advanced work on encryption algorithms done in the U.S. was done by the NSA. It was always suspected by people in the industry that the NSA put mathematical back doors into the encryption algorithms that it published, which the government could use to eavesdrop on communications encrypted with that algorithm. Whether or not this is actually practical has always been a source of rumor and urban legend.

What the NSA and the FBI sought to do with the Clipper mechanism was deliberately put in a back door, the nature of which would be published and not a secret. A Clipper device would use a special processor chip which would have the encryption algorithm wired into it, along with a device identifier and a key for that specific device. When the device produced a stream of encrypted data, every so often it would put in something called the Law Enforcement Access Field, or LEAF. This would contain the device identifier info and some synchronizing codes. The FBI would be able to take the LEAF and look up the key from a (hopefully) secret mater database, and then decrypt the communications. In theory, accessing the database would require a search warrant. Had the legislation behind this been passed, it would have made all other methods of encryption illegal for the private sector.

This turned out to have any number of problems. It turned out to be possible to spoof the LEAF, and that the LEAF was vulnerable to a cryptanalysis attack which would have reduced the time needed to find the key without accessing the database. reasons it was necessary to generate all of the keys from a single "mother" key. Had the mother key ever been revealed, it would have instantly rendered every Clipper worthless.

The short version is: I'm not the expert on encryption, but knowing what I do know about it, I can't see any way to make escrowed encryption do what it is supposed to do. Either it can easily be defeated (you can get strong encryption software from a whole bunch of sources these days, and you could use it "inside" the escrowed encryption), or it is vulnerable to the revealing of a world-breaking secret, such as a mother key. And that's before we get into the issue of whether or not government can be trusted with that kind of access, which recent history suggests it can't.

In the "I hope so" category:

http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2016/02/is-your-bacon-sandwich-oppressing-women.html

Take a virtual flyover of the beautiful Mediterranean! http://go.nasa.gov/1TvHsnc it shows extremely heavy weather modification at work using aerial spraying.

Jefe, there's no indication that the grey aliens were snorting that aerial spray and everyone knows they love that stuff. How could you leave that out?

Unless you're a reptilian agent, of course, in which case - keep up the good work! Soon the humans will be toiling in your mealworm mines for the benefit of the High Council.

I have a friend who retired from Signal Corps who insists that something else is going on - that they can brute that phone in a couple of days. Yes, they have hardware and software specifically for doing that. It's expensive.

What is being asked for is immediacy. What is being demanded is that no one, and especially no company, is superior to government force.

And once again, the public is being told that they must do something because, criminals!

How to make yourself unemployable (unless it's for Vox Media or Buzzfeed)

http://diply.com/trendyjoe/article/employee-body-shamed-by-ceo-quits-job/1

Bill Moyers points out Obama's war on whistleblowers.

Financial crimes then vs. financial crimes now.

"What is being demanded is that no one, and especially no company, is superior to government force."

What's interesting has been watching the rest of Silicon Valley line up on the government's side. Bill Gates said this morning that Apple should comply. Tim Cook is getting pilloried and Apple, which has for many years been a reliable supporter of left-wing causes, is suddenly Public Enemy Number One.

I'm convinced that the ultimate point of this exercise is for the government to have unlimited access to everything that is online. Back when electronic telephone exchange switches were being installed in the 1980s, there was a big brouhaha over the fact that traditional call-tracing and wiretapping methods couldn't work with these switches. The government compelled the switch manufacturers to install back doors in the switches that would allow law enforcement to access to perform wiretaps and get phone call metadata info. However, the traditional Bell companies and most of the independents jealously guarded their interfaces and refused to enable the law enforcement access until they were shown a warrant, and then they monitored the use of the interface to make sure the officer performing the search only accessed what was authorized in the warrant. I know of cases where phone company employees went to jail rather than allow access to the switch by a law officer lacking a warrant. (In the cases I know of, they were quickly released.)

Today's tech and communications companies won't do that. They voluntarily build in the back doors, and they set them up so the government can use them un-monitored. Federal law enforcement agencies only need then find a judge who will issue a general warrant under seal (like the FISA court warrant that authorized the collection of everyone's cell phone metadata), and it's off to the races. And actually, they don't even really need that if they feel like they are politically in a strong enough position to not need the legal fig leaf. Just scoop everything up, do your data mining, and get an after-the-fact warrant for anything you want to use in court. Great for finding things that you can use to embarrass or indict political opponents.