No doubt he will. But let's stay focused on the debate for now. He's still in office. There's still time to share facts with him.
He says he has a digital services team. Who holds those positions currently?
And who are his technology advisors? What are they saying on this issue? What have they shared with Obama?
From Obama's remarks, it sounds like he treats the digital services team more as a toolset, rather than a team of trusted advisors.
EDIT: The next PCAST (President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology) meeting will be on March 25 and webcast here [1]. No need to sign up, just visit that page on the date to view. I suggest we all watch this and submit questions to their group in advance.
They meet every other month. The last meeting was on January 15, which predates Comey's open letter to the public (Feb 21) about the San Bernardino case, so they have not yet publicly discussed encryption in light of what's happened since Comey's letter.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/pcast
I always liked Václav Havel’s short speech from 1991 where he coined the phrase “power unto death”:
That speech I bookmarked. Despite the terrible formatting that speech is a work of art applicable to every human being who holds power, whether it's POTUS or the office manager.
javascript:var sheet = document.createElement('style');sheet.innerHTML = "body{margin: 40px auto;max-width: 650px;line-height: 1.5;font-size: 18px;color: #3a3a3a;padding: 0 10px;}";document.body.appendChild(sheet);
It is excellent for solving the information craving that goes, "I could have sworn that I read something about that...", and then actually finding it later, sometimes years later, in appropriate need. I don't use that capability very often, but I love the feeling that I have a permanent archive of all this information.
Which points to a significant problem with the Web: one reason we're inundated with crap styles is that the browser defaults are crap.
If the W3C and browser vendors set sane margins, padding, font sizes, etc., at least we could fall back to these rather than deal with the crap of current website design.
But the defaults are crap, and designers try to "improve" on them, and ....
That said, unstyled HTML (if that's what this is, I can't inspect the page) remains better in most cases than styled pages.
For a brief interlude in American history, we had a president that didn't capitalize on terror attacks politically, or generally set a tone of paranoia and fear.
We won't always be this lucky.
What does any of that have to do with the fact that he does not understand encryption technology?
I can appreciate some things about Obama and not others.
People aren't all bad or good. I support ideas, not people, just as I hate the game, not the player.
We wouldn't live like that in a Trump administration. We would live in fear.
And Secretary Clinton had been meeting with representatives of Britain, France and the Arab countries. And she sort of essentially called in from Paris and then from Cairo, and she ended up tipping the balance and essentially convincing President Obama, who later described this as a 51-49 decision, to join the other countries in the coalition to bomb Gaddafi’s forces."
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/3/the_libya_gamble_inside...
In comparison, six weeks after 9/11 we got the entire PATRIOT act rammed through, and the current NSA domestic panopticon put into place illegally and in secret.
And the administration is making it's arguments openly, we are not being manipulated by the general climate and context.
We aren't being made to feel afraid in the way we were in those dark years. We are not being told to buy duct tape and plastic sheeting to seal doors and windows in case of biological or chemical attack. The administration is not making a big show of deploying missile batteries in DC, while the Terror Alert is raised another shade, all based on "chatter".
We had a Vice-President say we are going to have to "work the dark side", and he meant torture. And we did, in dark dungeons on the far side of the world.
We started to torture, and we all have to live with seeing torture a regular fixture in our entertainment. That wasn't the case in the same way before the Bush administration normalized the practice. Obama ended this inhumanity on his first day in office.
When I see how far reaching the changes to our culture were, when I see how it's percolated, when I see it in Hostel, Game of Thrones, or in the far more radical Scandal, which is actually honest about the sadistic motivations behind torture, I wince and mourn what we lost as Americans, and I curse the name of Dick Cheney.
We were, all of us, debased. Even our culture and entertainment was debased.
And the open source, lone wolf style of ISIS has a far greater potential to be exploited to cause mass hysteria. The fact that it isn't is a refreshing departure from what I fear is the norm in American politics.
The entire stance, attitude and tone from Obama makes me feel secure. Because I'm far more afraid of government overreach and repression than any terrorist group.
Watching Trump, hearing Chris Christie call this WW III, it gives me terrible flashbacks to a time I am glad is over.
"And let's assume that we were to send 50,000 troops into Syria -- what happens when there's a terrorist attack generated from Yemen? Do we then send more troops into there? Or Libya perhaps? Or if there's a terrorist network that's operating anywhere else in North Africa or in Southeast Asia?
- Barack Obama
So what? The underlying debate is whether or not the DOJ should be allowed to require phone manufacturers to guarantee they can decrypt phone data when served with a warrant.
You can rally for Apple to make a more secure phone all you want. That is a separate issue. It doesn't change the fact that the DOJ is willing to do everything it can to get access to all phones through the courts or Congress. They don't care how it happens, they just want it.
It's not about one phone, it's not even just about the phones the DOJ currently has waiting to be decrypted. It's about every phone in the world. The DOJ knows this, but they can't say that because it is part of their position to argue that this is only about one phone.
This is politics. These are lawyers. They will say anything that they think will convince a judge, Congress or the American people to win them to what they believe is the correct side. That's how our system works.
They're not conspiring to do evil. They just don't have all the facts. And even if they are conspiring to do evil, our course should be the same. We should educate each other about how encryption works, and how legislation requiring backdoors would actually make us all less safe on balance than having no backdoors at all.
Trump would make you pine for the days of George W. Bush. I think we took for granted the fact that Bush did things to smooth bigotry rather than incite it, like publicly declaring that Islam is a religion of peace and taking care to distinguish al-Qaeda from Islam in general. I think rather than pinning these things on the President we should take a look at the media, the rest of the government, and most importantly the public. Like it or not, the nationally televised murder-by-airliner of 3,000 people is going to incite panic, hatred, overreaction, and fear to a degree that not even the most resolute President can control.
That's going on the assumption that he had integrity in the first place and I'm no longer immune to considering the possibility that he did not and just played the voters for all it was worth.
For instance: someone with integrity would have returned an un-deserved Nobel peace prize.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Nobel_Peace_Prize
Quoting "Obama said he was "surprised" and "deeply humbled" by the award. He stated that he does not feel he deserved the award,[14][15] and that he did not feel worthy of the company the award would place him in."
So if that was his stance he should have refused.
It's not as if he brought lasting peace to some place that's been on fire for the last 3 decades, besides the prize was awarded way too early in his first term for him to have time enough to accomplish such a thing in the first place (after only 9 months).
My personal view on this is that he mostly received it because he wasn't Bush and they were trying to shame him into doing the right thing (which may have had a point) but I don't think that worked out too well.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2009/
The big international war issue from 2003 to 2008 was the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Enter Barack Obama, a candidate who campaigns vigorously on trying to get America out of Iraq and trying to limit or even undo some of the damage America inflicted on itself during that war (not to mention Iraq and its people).
Things have not gone all that well. But, when I imagine what would have happened if McCain had been elected, I conclude that things would have gone even worse.
What other candidate was pushing as vigorously for de-escalating and militarily disengaging from Iraq as Obama was? Hillary Clinton??
Where would we be on this particular issue if Senator Obama had not decided to run for president -- if he had just left it all to the existing establishment candidates?
Is this a bad analysis of the situation?
I dont see how he should have gotten it personaly.
As strange as it may sound, the Clintons did the most for the pro-encryption side of this debate. Former President Clinton passed CALEA, which TechDirt points out applies to "manufacturers and providers of telecommunications support services" [1]. Also from CALEA,
> (1) Design of features and systems configurations. This subchapter does not authorize any law enforcement agency or office
> (a) to require any specific design of equipment, facilities, services, features, or system configurations to be adopted by any provider of a wire or electronic communication service, any manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, or any provider of telecommunications support services;
> (b) to prohibit the adoption of any equipment, facility, service, or feature by any provider of a wire or electronic communication service, any manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, or any provider of telecommunications support services.
I believe the judge in the San Bernardino case will point to this to deny the DOJ's request to use the All Writs Act to compel Apple to write the special version of the OS. At the very least, CALEA is a strong statement that Congress has already decided that they will not pass laws requiring Apple and others to put backdoors in their phones. That doesn't mean the debate is over, however. Many people still do not understand encryption technology and will blame technologists for standing in the way of legislation that they perceive would have saved us from certain terrorist attacks.
Although Bernie has said he's against surveillance, he and many of his most vocal supporters remain uninformed about encryption. I tried posting a couple times in the Sanders subreddit, calling for Sanders to take a stronger position in support of end-to-end encryption [2]. The response was he can't take a position on this because it isn't a major issue. I think that time is fast approaching. Obama hasn't let up, and obviously neither will technologists. It's difficult for a politician or law enforcement official to tell the population that they can't track all communications in the manner they used to be able to, and on the other hand, we technologists cannot simply ask math to stop working.
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160223/23441033692/how-e...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident/comments/49otvu...
Huh? You must be too young to remember the Clinton presidency, but Clinton's administration made a huge push to force everyone to use the "Clipper" chip for encryption, which would have both mandated a specific type of (not-so-strong) encryption and given the government the keys for it through key-escrow. We're really lucky that Clinton couldn't get that one through Congress, but to claim that the Clintons are pro-encryption is being completely ignorant about history. They're only pro-key-escrowed encryption.
I didn't say the Clintons were pro-encryption. I said, "Oddly enough, they did the most for this side of the debate".
Maybe that's inaccurate, in that they probably weren't responsible for the exact language that comes to Apple's rescue in CALEA, however Clinton did sign it.
Anyway, my point was, in a thread about the iPhone case, in response to a comment with a user praising Bernie Sanders, that Bernie has not said anything different about encryption than Obama or Clinton, and that's it. That's my whole point. I am not making this political, I'm just sharing facts. Of course we know Hillary won't do jack to protect strong encryption. I don't think Sanders will support it either, based on what he's said so far.
I completely agree, I bet it's not a great job most of the time and a really different and isolated world.
there will probably not be a single American that thinks a bomb proof car in a exaggeration.
Everyone in the world knows the President's car is a mobile battle fortress. I saw an entire show about it on the History Channel.
That's not because he's detached from the people, though, it's an unfortunate necessity of office. The last time an American President rode around in public in a convertible, it didn't end well for him.
A while back he advised some kids in College to never type anything into a computer if they want it to remain private. For him, it probably seems completely reasonable. I doubt he's touched a keyboard since he became president. His daughters are the only teenagers in America who've never been near Snapchat (the Secret Service will keep it that way). And he's literally surrounded by security officers and spooks everywhere he goes. They manage every interaction he has so you can imagine their worldview is going to affect him.
I'm not trying to make excuses for him. He's so completely off the deep end nowadays (between this and TPP) that it's heartbreaking as a long time supporter. I hope he leaves the presidency, leaves Washington and spends a few years thinking about what went wrong before writing his memoirs. It would be an amazing insight into the corrosive influence of Washington on a person's integrity.