I'm not sure if "overwhelmingly mindless" is the right characterization. In my opinion, the most interesting story playing out among the Western nations is what is happening in Poland right now. In the USA, people fought for independence from Britain starting in 1775, so obviously those people are not alive in 2016. But in Poland, many of the people alive now are the same people who overthrew tyranny in 1989. That's an interesting story. Among the Polish public there are many who were willing to risk their lives to fight for a more open, democratic and liberal political system, in 1989. And now, in 2016, Poland is suffering the same shift towards authoritarianism that we see in other Western countries.

Just so I'm clear, I'm saying I find this interesting because in many cases we are talking about the same people who were alive in 1989. In the USA you can say "Oh, that generation believed in those things, but those currently alive don't believe in these things." (I don't agree with that statement, but you could make that argument.) Whereas in Poland, it's in many cases the same people who fought for a more open system who are now tolerating the drift towards a more authoritarian system.

To me, the story isn't about "overwhelmingly mindless" voters, its about voters who are angry with the failure of the system. That is, they are mindful of how the system has failed. They may not know what the answer is, but they are angry, and they are willing to elect politicians who seem to mirror their anger. It might be a bad strategy to vote for someone simply because they appear to reflect your anger, but I think I can understand the motivation, and it is not quite the same as being mindless.

In counterpoint to this, witness the mass protests (by women) against the proposed ban in abortion. A religious right wing pressure group pushed it along, the govt backed it, mass protests, humiliating back down. Goes to show how out if touch ruling parties are about what people think, and their belief that people actually do support their hard line policies.

In actuality, maybe people are just voting based in whether their economic circumstances improved over the last term, regardless of whether the change was due to national or global factors. Maybe they just don't like the Russians and voted for the nationalist rhetoric.

Both events can be equally connected to nationalistic conservatism: the national identity of Poland is as much defined by slavic resistance to anything non-slavic coming from the west (e.g. the Teutonic Knights of old) as it is by catholic resistance to anything non-catholic coming from the east (e.g. eastern churches, anti-church ideologies like forced communism and most famously, Turks sieging Vienna).

If a voter's reaction to anger with a failed system is to shoot themselves in the foot with a pistol they've had laying around since '89, I'm going to stick with the "mindless" appellation.

Reading this from the Forbes article: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3143273/Mass-Fing...

Relevant bits start at page 5 (III - LEGAL DISCUSSION).

    Compelling a person to provide his or her fingerprint does not
    implicate, let alone violate, the Fifth Amendment. "[B]oth
    federal and state courts have usually held that [the Fifth
    Amendment] offers no protection against compulsion to submit
    to fingerprinting."

    Schmerber v. California, 384 U.S. 757, 764 (1966). 

    That is so because the Fifth Amenmendment privilege against self-
    incrimination only prevents the use against an accused of
    testimonial or communicative evidence obtained from him.

and yet here they are as a matter of fact seeking "communicative evidence".

But my phone is mine, it contains deeply personal things that I put on there without the intention of sharing them. How is forcing me to unlock my phone anything other than forcing me to testifying against myself?

If they could, they would read your mind too.

The analogy that's sometimes used is that of a safe full of documents. Current case law says that you can be compelled to turn over a key but cannot be compelled to turn over a password [1].

The Department of Justice is saying that a fingerprint is more like a key than a password I guess. Or alternatively that unlocking phones is search and not testimony.

The EFF seems to be primarily objecting on the grounds that a search of "all devices in the building" is too vague to be a correct warrant.

[1] http://www.uclalawreview.org/the-fifth-amendment-encryption-...

Couldn't you say the same about a safe on the premises being searched?

The self-incrimination clause of the fifth amendment is broadly interpreted as intended to dissuade the government from attempting to coerce confessions. Forcing someone to unlock their phone with a fingerprint caries none of the moral hazard of forcing them to testify.

All of that being said, I'd love for US society to recognize that a search encompassing a bunch of people's phones is vastly more intrusive (by virtue of the volume of data collected and network effects) than a search of a building that excludes computing devices, and for us to require a correspondingly higher burden of proof.

How about we stop expecting "justice" to work in our favour and start forcing it to work in our favour?

If you don't want anybody to be able to take your stuff, don't make it possible for somebody to take your stuff. A piece of paper saying something isn't permitted is not going to stop it happening.

If the piece of paper says I can be forced to tell them my password, they will try to force me... and I will give my password. You can simply put people in jail for not disclosing their password, when the law provides these means.

The fingerprint is not communicative. That's the crux of the matter. The state of law, currently, is that if the police have you, and they have your phone, and they have probable cause that your phone contains evidence of a crime, they can compel you to press fingers to the phone.

It's no different, really, then that they can force you to press your fingers onto a sheet of paper for booking during an arrest, or to take a buccal swab.

What they apparently cannot do is force you to admit what if any finger of your would unlock the phone. Apparently some people use tricks like locking the phone with a knuckle or even the tip of their nose (that one sounds comical). Really though, it goes to show that the good old fashioned memorized password has not gone out of style. Any biometric or dongle-based authentication or encryption can be circumvented by legal process.

And in a civil matter, judges and parties have even more power. Ultimately, if a court is convinced that you know a password and are not properly invoking a 5th amendment privilege against criminal self-incrimination, you could be held in contempt (fined daily, or jailed) until you provided the password or the password-protected materials. At this point it could well become a battle of wills and proofs, which the contemnor may well lose.

"If it's something you have, it can be taken off you"

yet this law was made for identification purposes, not unlocking safes.

Right, and considering fingerprint's long history as identification, it seems like it would be both impossible & unreasonable to try to split the two uses. Can we really say "You only obtained his fingerprint for the purpose of identifying him, you can't use it to unlock the phone"? And, we can't reasonably try to end the use of fingerprints as ID...

> Can we really say "You only obtained his fingerprint for the purpose of identifying him, you can't use it to unlock the phone"?

That seems to me to be a very reasonable thing to say. It seems to me that we have plenty of mechanism in place to say "you have X, you can use it for Y, and not Z, because using it for Z violates someone's rights". As a super contrived strawman example, if your computer ever gets confiscated by law enforcement, while they may be permitted to search it, they can't just play Fallout 4 or mine bitcoins on it.

Another instance I think is similar in concept: juries are instructed to disregard things (i.e. pretend they don't have a piece of information for the purposes of a trial) all the time, when access to this information would be improper.

To be clear I don't think it's unreasonable, it just seems it would be difficult to define & enforce, because it's already matter of public record. For example, what if the fingerprint was lifted from the scene of the crime? Can you use that to unlock the phone?

if your house key is laying outside, can they use it without a warrant?

Exactly, the fingerprints aren't material evidence in this case, but communicative testimony that could lead them to unspecified future material evidence on their phone. It's not the same thing at all.

No, it's what happens when large numbers of people decide they care about safety and security more than they care about freedom. That doesn't necessarily make it any better, but to attribute this outcome to mindlessness is to badly miss the point. The first step to solving a problem is to understand what the problem actually is.

Let's put this in its political context. We are citizens of a constitutional republic. A republic, as far as I understand it, implies that a (thoughtful, responsible, .., elected) minority is afforded the delegated power to legislate, judge, and administer.

The 'actual problem' seems to be in the selection/delegation process. The minority that is currently in charge has framed the question as that of "safety and security" vs liberties ("freedoms"). The corporate media (aka "journalists" and "free press") is more than happy to support this thesis. The "people", lets be frank here, were never expected to be a nation of Jeffersons. And it is unreasonable to expect them to be astute techno-political scientists carefully weighing various implications of technology and policy.

Other unelected minorities -- corporations such as Apple, Google, Facebook, ... -- could by fiat choose to only offer goods that preserve our liberties. They chose not to do so and arguably they are not under an obligation to do so. (Note arguably.)

Other unelected minorities -- technologists that work for the above -- have also elected to lend their talents to produce these systems, platforms, and devices that erode our liberties. Again, arguably they don't really have much choice in the matter, as we all must pay the proverbial rent.

So, imho, beyond the cliche that 'a people deserve their government' (which is a congenital defect of a political body), there remains the framework that was intended to select the best and brightest minority that would be entrusted with carefully considering various options. It is this framework that is currently broken. I accuse our so called "free press" for a playing a substantial role in the dysfunction of our political system.

There are other responsible parties for sure, but the press and media play a critical role in knowingly confusing and frightening the majority -- a role known as agitprop in the USSR.

[edit: noop cleanup]

> A republic, as far as I understand it, implies that a (thoughtful, responsible, .., elected) minority is afforded the delegated power to legislate, judge, and administer.

Elected, yes. Thoughtful and responsible depends on your point of view. For example: there is a substantial contingent of people in the U.S. that want the country to be a Christian theocracy. (Most of these people believe that this is how things used to be, and they want to return to those halcyon days.) And so, unsurprisingly, these people vote for representatives who they think will advance that goal. So, for example, is Roy Moore "thoughtful and responsible"? If you're a member of this contingent then you probably think he is. If you're not, then you probably don't.

Likewise, there is a substantial contingent of people who are scared witless at the thought of terrorism, and think that it's worth trading in the odd civil right to insure that terrorists are not "free" to plot our destruction unmolested. There is a substantial contingent of people who are unrepentant racists who think black people are less than human and the root of all evil. Likewise for Muslims. All of these people not only don't care when "the bad guys" have their civil rights violated by the cops, they think it's a feature. They see the cops as courageous defenders of their point of view against the corrupting influence of pluralism and wussiness. The vaguaries of our electoral system make a difference at the margins (e.g. by gerrymandering) but none of these things would be possible if there were not millions of people who thought that it was good and proper.

The irony is that by blaming the system instead of acknowledging that the outcomes we see are the result of democracy working exactly as intended you are actually contributing to the problem, which is that everyone retreats into their echo chamber and spends their energy vilifying anyone who doesn't agree with them instead of working constructively to figure out how all 7+ billion of us are going to get along on this little planet.

> The irony is that by blaming the system instead of acknowledging that the outcomes we see are the result of democracy working exactly as intended you are actually contributing to the problem, which is that everyone retreats into their echo chamber and spends their energy vilifying anyone who doesn't agree with them instead of working constructively to figure out how all 7+ billion of us are going to get along on this little planet.

But I am not blaming the system.

I pointed out bad faith actors in the system, which in my view, are contributing to the dysfunction of the process, and have poisoned political discourse in this nation. I don't remember the exact date when we crossed the threshold but do remember noting a somewhat abrupt introduction of extreme vulgarity and uncivility into televised political shows at some point in 90s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

The various POVs you mention are noted and point well taken. But were not these strains of thought present in the 80s, 70s, and before? I haven't watched TV in decades, but the few times I am exposed to it by force (visits to family, public spaces, etc.) my skin literally crawls, regardless of which point of view is being voiced. It's like the planet of the vulgarian apes. Don't you think the public that is exposed to this /garbage/ day after day has been conditioned to act in the same manner?

> Likewise, there is a substantial contingent of people who are scared witless at the thought of terrorism, and think that it's worth trading in the odd civil right to insure that terrorists are not "free" to plot our destruction unmolested.

This is the only POV that I find unacceptable. This view -- propagated from on high from -- is the factual "blaming the system". The clear subtext of this manufactured view is that our system is fragile and inadequate in face of enemies and needs corrective measures that alter the very nature of our system. Yes, the people were scared, but it was not the people who pulled the Patriot Act out of God knows where and passed it without even an attempt at deliberation.

They could have been offered other remedies, but were not. They could have been reassured by national leadership that we can prevail without disfiguring our national character, but were not.

Americans torturing and torture shows on cable TV.

Disgraceful.

Wagging fingers is one of the more boring forms of political discourse, and no matter how unacceptable you find an opinion, you will never finger-wag someone out of one.

You are wagging fingers also, and therefore boring.

Honestly, I've been finger-wagged out of an opinion or two, so "never" is too strong. Frankly, I challenge you to name any form of "political discourse" that regularly changes opinions. In my experience political discourse in general rarely accomplishes anything other than preach to the choir and cause opponents to dig in.

I'm not telling you what to do, which is a necessary component of the finger wagging. I do enjoy when people accuse me of the actions they are taking, though. Very human. Very, very human.

In my language, finger wagging is scolding someone, for what they've done (or failed to do). It's not telling them what to do.

You were certainly wagging your finger at a fingerwagger.

> But I am not blaming the system.

You wrote:

> The 'actual problem' seems to be in the selection/delegation process.

That sounds like blaming the system to me.

Problem "in", not problem "is".

(In case you're interested, Pierre Sallinger touches on the post '72 role of the media in the selection process in his 1995 c-span interview: https://www.c-span.org/video/?67372-1/ps-memoir [edit: jump to 44:56])

That seems like splitting a pretty fine hair to me.

As a system administrator: No. It's not. A broken system and a system being misused are two entirely different things. It could be suggested that a system is broken if it can be misused and indeed an ideal system will be incapable of misuse. But I've never met one yet.

Do you claim here that elections (who votes, where, how often, in what conditions, for whom, for what, etc.) aren't part of "the system"? That probably isn't your intention, but you seem to hold the parenthesized conditions blameless, offering instead some sort of caricature of a Trump voter for criticism. Incidentally, if the participation of all those apparent cretins is "democracy working exactly as intended", how should we characterize previous elections in which they did not take part?

I was referring specifically to this:

> The 'actual problem' seems to be in the selection/delegation process.

ISTM there are problems in that process. Even if there aren't, there could be, and preemptively declaring such out of scope certainly wouldn't help solve those.

One has long suspected the insidious idea that the Founders etc. did such a Good Job that we mustn't criticize any current incarnation of the institutions and traditions they created. One used to hear this silly idea from "strict constructionists", but recently it seems to come mostly from devoted supporters of the status quo.

Of course there are problems in the process, but they pale in comparison to the fact that there are vast and fundamental differences in people's quality metrics, and even in what they mean by words like "freedom" and "equality" (e.g. is allowing gay marriage "equal rights" or is it "special treatment"?) So the whole premise of electing reasonable people to run the government is doomed from the start because Americans don't agree on what "reasonable" means. No amount of tinkering with the process is going to fix that.

This.

The free press is not objective, or benevolent, or ethical. Yes, parts of it may have started that way, but today's free press is merely free, in that it can and will say anything, within legal bounds. It ends up saying whatever gets the most eyeballs.

We need a better way to disseminate factual information to the public. Sadly, I have no idea how to do that.

Some donor-funded news sources are quite good.

https://theconversation.com/ has African, Australian, French, UK, US and global versions (but the African, US and global editions seem not to be donor-funded), Creative Commons licensing, and no advertising (but it does have sponsors).

I wonder how it would cope with a billion readers.

We were supposed to be nation of 'Jeffersons', or at least educated people with skin in the game. Only educated and land owning males were allowed the vote.

I'm sure part of the reason non land owners, slaves, women, etc. were not allowed to vote was in order to keep a certain group in power, but there have been many writers who correctly predicted what happens when everyone is allowed to vote:

"A democracy can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury."

The fact that you have something like 1/2 the citizens working and subsidizing the other half, along with our 24 hour news cycle that cannot be trusted anymore than Pravda at its worst, and I think we will probably look back and realize allowing everyone a vote is a bad idea, or no better than a monarchy or some other rule by a select few.

Not that I have a better idea, though

> We were supposed to be nation of 'Jeffersons', or at least educated people with skin in the game. Only educated and land owning males were allowed the vote.

What states include being educated as an input to their voter eligibility determination?

The presumption was that being a land owner was correlated with education. If not formal education, then at least an active interest in being informed about current affairs.

The current voting system doesn't help. A national popular vote for president under IRV and proportional representation for Congress are necessary parts of the solution.

irv would be nice, but I feel like campaign finance reform would help more.

If there's one thing standing in the way of campaign finance reform, it's everyone involved in campaigns and the financing of them.

The problem is that we're not exchanging freedom for security, we're exchanging freedom for the empty promise of security and the reality of a police state.

I'm still calling "mindless".

To give another example:

If the US were to outlaw all forms of encryption, we would have less privacy AND less security:

Less Privacy: all communication is now readable by a third party in the middle

Less Security: all banking information is now transmitted in plaintext

A locked phone is a lot less interesting to a burglar. If the convenience of touch ID means more people lock their phones, that's not an empty promise.

How many people lock their phones against burglary?

how many people lock their phones for any other reason?

I only lock my phone in case it's lost or stolen, I don't lock it to keep the government out of it, since pretty much everything on my phone is available in Google's Cloud services (except for my password protected password manager), which the feds can gain access to with a valid search warrant.

One. Me.

Huh... why? I mean, burglars and hackers are usually very different people, and the former usually doesn't care about what's on your phone, just your phone. I grant however, that you could have a particular situation perhaps relating to your work which might alter that.

The people stealing it usually want to resell it. They'll wipe it. The hackers want the data on it, esp if they can unlock it, since it might be valuable in itself or connected to your online accounts that they trade on black markets. A subset exists between the two which are people that might target you personally just to snoop, a grudge, incidentally to grabbing information you have on your business that's the actual target, and so on. Best to simply cover each one with whatever protections you need so the attackers' motivations and probability aren't something you need to guess.

You think a thief won't go through an unlocked phone they stole? Even if they don't, the person they fence it to will.

I think whatever is on your phone would be of little or no interest to either party.

Even the dumbest thief has a smartphone and knows it can contain information at least as valuable as the phone itself, and maybe even nudie pics.

The average burglar wouldn't know that, and wouldn't have anything they could do with that information. They're a drug addict who wants shit to fence for a fix. Burglary of the average residence is an insanely stupid crime with enormous risks and penalties.

Thieves sell the phone on to people who know how to exploit what is on your phone to try to get access to your accounts and money.

How would your phone give them access to any of that? All of that kind of thing is inevitably protected by more security layers they won't be able to break, and meanwhile, the phone itself is worth something once wiped. Worse, the longer they fiddle with your phone, unwiped, the longer they risk someone tracking that phone.

They're burglars, not masterminds.

What I heard is phones are often sold off by burglars to organized crime who do know how to exploit the phone to its full potential (and not get tracked, and properly wipe it and resell it after properly copying off the data/login credentials which is sold to another party, which then package the data with other data and sell that, and so on).

Wish I had some better sources. All I could find from a quick google search is that the market rate for full personal info is $20 -- that is certainly something you can get with email inbox access (which is enough to get Amazon login which would have your full address etc etc)

Keep in mind most services only needs your email address and browser cookies for full access, only banking services etc are 2FA.

? Who are the large numbers of people you speak of, who decided perceived "safety and security" are more desirable than freedom? Far as I can tell the general public had no say in the legislation, and the legislatures who pushed through the Patriot Act reassured their constituents that the abuses we're witnessing were not under the realm of possibility. Meanwhile the Feds techniques of warrant-less intervention and forced entry of suspects phone have yet to yield measurable results.

The general public is mindless to the extent of surveillance and the aggregation of that data, the vast majority are certainly unaware of the possible unintended consequences of wanton disregard for the 3rd, 4th and 5th amendments. Only a third of Americans can even name all three branches of government, to believe they're informed on matters they don't understand on a technical or philosophical level is badly overestimating the American Public.

Biometrics could be used as a username, but should not be used as a password...

If we keep repeating it, maybe someone will eventually listen ... Really, it should be obvious how bad an idea it is to use biometrics as passwords to large companies like Apple. I guess they figure (probably correctly) that customers favour convenience over security.

Exactly. It is a form of identification not authentication.

I heard fingerprints described as "Authentication, not authorisation", which I think is a better description of the role they play (on the iPhone, at least), and the role they should play.

They authenticate who you are, they aren't trivial to fake. However, they shouldn't authorise access to a device on their own. Your fingerprint works as a somewhat more secure, medium term swipe-to-unlock for your phone.

> I heard fingerprints described as "Authentication, not authorisation",

I understand once you've authenticated who the user is, authorization is just a mask of what they are allowed to do. It is like saying "after you've given your username (GMail account) to Google, it should allow you to read your email. If you happen to be an administrator for Google Business account you can also see other accounts or settings etc".

So hopefully you meant that you just use your fingerprint in place of typing out your username not in place of typing your username _and_ password.

One could see fingerprint and user/pw as two different roles - with different levels of authorisation.

(Somehow similar to sudo which asks for the user's password the first time but assumes that the logged in user is allowed to execute further sudo commands without pw auth. Even if sudo does not really implement two different user roles here.)

Authorization typically means what actions the authenticated user is allowed to perform, not that the authenticated user has herself conveyed some kind of approval.

Careful, authentication / authorization have specific definitions in software development which are at odds with what you say. A username/password together would be authentication.

A sizable majority would go along with this, because they haven't been come for yet, as the saying goes.

To use another saying, the frogs in this pot are just about boiled... if not now, it's going to be too late, if it isn't already.

> Just another reason to forgo the convenience of biometrics in favor of a password/phrase that exists only in your mind. At least for now, that's something you can't be compelled to produce.

Unless by rubber hose cryptanalysis. Still better than being compelled to produce one's finger, though ;)

Alternative idea:intentionally register someone else's fingerprints on your phone - so when the cops arrive and find a phone lying on the couch you can plausibly say "not mine, here try my finger on it!" ;-)

(Anybody got ready access to med school cadavers with the fingerprints intact?)

I really wish you could set up functionality for each finger. Index unlocks, but thumb instantly wipes the phone.

Keeping your fingers wet will also prevent the mechanism from working.

> a sizeable majority don't even participate

That might be your best hope.

(Respectfully submitted, etc, etc.)