A couple of years after it happened, Australian citizens are finally being (indirectly) informed their government harvested cell site location info to track their daily activities. This isn't the work of an intelligence agency or a secretive law enforcement effort. Instead, it's an (unannounced) partnership between the Australian Bureau of Statistics (which handles the Australian Census) and a cellphone service provider. The provider apparently willingly turned over cell site info without a court demand, government mandate, or consultation with its customers. Asher Wolf has the details at Medium:

The ABS claims population estimates have a “major data gap” and so they’ve been a busy bee figuring out a way to track crowd movement. Their solution? Mobile device user data.

“…with its near-complete coverage of the population, mobile device data is now seen as a feasible way to estimate temporary populations,” states a 2017 conference extract for a talk by ABS Demographer Andrew Howe.

While the “Estimated Resident Population” (ERP) is Australia’s official population measure, the ABS felt the pre-existing data wasn’t ‘granular’ enough. What the ABS really wanted to know was where you’re moving, hour by hour, through the CBD, educational hubs, tourist areas.

Third-party records are almost always easily-accessible. They are subject to very limited protections. But generally when the government wants access to records, it's because they're targeting someone in a criminal or national security investigation. What few people expect is for the government to obtain this data en masse, then proudly proclaim its usefulness a couple of years after it's already made use of it.

Cellphone users weren't informed of the government's plans. And the telco made no effort to inform affected customers or give them an opportunity to opt out. While it may look like an innocuous effort to gauge temporary population increases linked to special events and holiday weekends, the information obtained could easily be mined to gain insight on traffic to places of worship, government buildings, airports, workplaces, and protests.

Supposedly, the information has been anonymized. It obviously hasn't been completely stripped of personal information. The slide deck [PDF] detailing the effort notes the data can be broken down by age and sex. The anonymization claim is made without any support from the ABS, which still has yet to provide any further info -- much less a privacy impact assessment -- via its website.

As Wolf points out, the ABS doesn't exactly have a great track record on either data anonymization or protecting the massive amount of data it collects.

Considering the last attempt by a government department to roll-their-own-crypto resulted in the MBS/PBS data breach of 2.5 million Australians, it’d be nice to know exactly how the ABS or telco anonymised and aggregated the data — especially since the ABS on-sells micro-data, from time to time.

As other rights agencies and activists note, the collection of personal info in bulk by the government is always alarming. At best, the techniques deployed here are "deeply unethical." At worst, they conjure images of the worst government behavior: the use of personal info to target specific groups for additional surveillance or internment (as was done with the Japanese during World War II using US Census data). The entire project was undertaken with zero public notice by an agency already known for being cavalier in its treatment of the wealth of personal information obtained through the Census.

ABS has promised more answers but has ignored Wolf's direct questions about study -- including the telco involved and the method used to anonymize the data. When it finally delivers its "detailed information paper" -- two years after the fact -- it's unlikely the details will include the answers Wolf is seeking.

Although blogging may have lost its early excitement for many, in some countries it still represents a vital channel for news that may not be available elsewhere. For example, as Global Voices explains:

Blogging emerged in Tanzania around 2007 and became popular as an alternative news platform with educated, middle class people, as well as politicians and political parties. In Tanzania, where media historically holds strong ties to government interests, blogging opened up possibilities for individuals to establish private news outlets that proved immensely powerful in terms of reach and readership.

The current Tanzanian government is not very happy about this uncontrolled flow of information to the people. But instead of anything so crude as shutting down blogs directly, it has come up with a more subtle, but no less effective, approach:

On March 16, 2018, the United Republic of Tanzania issued the Electronic and Postal Communications (Online Content) Regulations demanding that bloggers must register and pay over USD $900 per year to publish online.

To put that in context, Tanzania's GDP per capita was under $900 in 2016, so the new fees are completely out of reach for the majority of people in the country. As Quartz notes, in addition, the registration process is onerous, and the fines for infringement serious:

applicants are expected to fill a form detailing the estimated cost of investment, the number of directors and stakeholders in the platform, their share of capital, staff qualifications, expected dates of commencing operations, besides future growth plans.

But even after providing this documentation, authorities still reserve the right to revoke a permit if a site publishes content that "causes annoyance, threatens harm or evil, encourages or incites crimes" or jeopardizes "national security or public health and safety." Officials could also force managers to remove "prohibited content" within 12 hours or face fines not less than five million shillings ($2,210) or a year in prison.

The situation is slightly easier in Tanzania's northern neighbor, Uganda. Under a new order there (pdf), "All online data communication service providers, including online publishers, online news platforms, online radio and television operators" are required to register with the Uganda Communications Commission. However, there's no mention of fees, or punishments for non-compliance. But if life for Ugandan bloggers seems to be easier than for those in Tanzania, a new daily tax on social media is designed to discourage ordinary users from engaging in what Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni calls "lugambo", or gossip, online. A report in the local Daily Monitor newspaper quotes the President as saying:

"I am not going to propose a tax on internet use for educational, research or reference purposes... these must remain free. However, olugambo on social media (opinions, prejudices, insults, friendly chats) and advertisements by Google and I do not know who else must pay tax because we need resources to cope with the consequences of their lugambo"

The amount of the daily tax is not clear -- a BBC report on the move says it might be either 100 or 200 Ugandan shillings ($0.013 or $0.027) a day -- and there are no details yet on how the new law will be enforced and the taxes collected for services deemed to involve "gossip". But as another Global Voices post notes, this social media tax is just the latest clampdown on the online world in Uganda. It quotes a January 2018 report from Unwanted Witness, a Ugandan NGO, which said:

2017 registered the highest number of Ugandans ever arrested for their online expression and these arrests are clearly targeted crackdown on free flow of information and speech on the Internet.

Different as they are, what the moves in Tanzania and Uganda both show is African governments coming up with new ways to muzzle online commentators that seek to tell people what the official media don't.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+.

Remember GEMSA (Global Equty Management (SA) Pty. Ltd.)? That's the Australian patent troll who "won" a Stupid Patent of the Month award from EFF for its silly patent (US Patent 6,690,400 on "virtual cabinets representing a discrete operating system." GEMSA sued a bunch of companies, including Airbnb and Zillow for supposedly violating the patent. Oh, and then it sued EFF in Australia, getting an order from the court demanding that EFF take down its article and barring EFF from ever publishing anything about any GEMSA patents.

That kinda thing is not going to fly in the US, and so EFF went to court in the US, seeking declaratory judgment that such an Australian court order was totally unenforceable in the US under the SPEECH Act. Late last year, the court gave a thorough and complete victory to EFF, making it clear that GEMSA could not, in any way, hope to enforce its Australian order in the US, as it clearly would violate EFF's First Amendment rights.

And now, the US Patent Office has basically killed GEMSA's patent that EFF called out in the first place, via the all important inter partes review system that is currently being challenged at the Supreme Court (ruling coming soon...).

The ’400 patent described its “invention” as “a Graphic User Interface (GUI) that enables a user to virtualize the system and to define secondary storage physical devices through the graphical depiction of cabinets.” In other words, virtual storage cabinets on a computer. E-Bay, Alibaba, and Booking.com, filed a petition for inter partes review arguing that claims from the ’400 patent were obvious in light of the Partition Magic 3.0 User Guide (1997) from PowerQuest Corporation. Three administrative patent judges from the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) agreed.

The PTAB opinion notes that Partition Magic’s user guide teaches each part of the patent’s Claim 1, including the portrayal of a “cabinet selection button bar,” a “secondary storage partitions window,” and a “cabinet visible partition window.”

The opinion demonstrated this graphically as well:

The PTAB laughed off GEMSA's argument that the original owner of the patent, Flash Vos, somehow "moved the computer industry a quantum leap forward in the late 90's" by pointing out that GEMSA "has put forth no evidence that Flash Vos or GEMSA actually had any commercial success." Ouch.

I'm curious if GEMSA will now seek to sue the US Patent Office in Australia as well...

It's said that there is no honor among thieves, but it should be obvious that such a blanket axiom is bound to be at least partially bullshit. Still, this mantra gets applied to the pirating community by its enemies, with those that rip and/or view pirated content labeled as ungrateful kid-slobs, simply looking for any content they can gobble up without any payment whatsoever. Any value or benefit derived from this community is denied or ignored, with the spotlight being only on the inflated injury this same community inflicts on unimaginably wealthy companies and studios.

Again, it should be obvious that this is all bound to be bullshit.

In fact, we've discussed the potential benefits to be found within these communities often in the past. Pirate communities can be viewed as a sort of market study companies get for free, serve as a spotlight on under-served potential customers, and not to mention that this community often buys more content then does their non-pirating cousins. None of this is to excuse copyright infringement, of course, but rather serves to remind us that the world is not black and white, and is instead muddled, complicated, and mushy.

Much like Amazon's streaming service the past few weeks, actually. A fact we only really know about due to this same pirating community doing the investigative work for free.

This week there’s been a sustained chorus of disapproval over the quality of pirate video releases sourced from Amazon Prime. The anger is usually directed at piracy groups who fail to capture content in the correct manner but according to a number of observers, the problem is actually at Amazon’s end.

Discussions on Reddit, for example, report that episodes in a single TV series have been declining in filesize and bitrate, from 1.56 GB in 720p at a 3073 kb/s video bitrate for episode 1, down to 907 MB in 720p at just 1514 kb/s video bitrate for episode 10. Numerous theories as to why this may be the case are being floated around, including that Amazon is trying to save on bandwidth expenses. While this is a possibility, the company hasn’t made any announcements to that end.

Reports suggest the drop in quality is no small thing. Further investigation has shown that the streaming quality via Amazon Prime has had something like a 50% drop. Given how clear it is that the quality of legitimate services has a direct impact on the public's willingness to engage in piracy, we can only speculate on why Amazon thought that downgrading its streaming quality was a good idea. What doesn't seem to be in question, however, is that it did so on purpose.

With Amazon distancing itself from the issues, piracy groups have already begun to dig in the knife. Release group DEFLATE has been particularly critical.

“Amazon, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to start fucking with the quality of their encodes. They’re now reaching Netflix’s subpar 1080p.H264 levels, and their H265 encodes aren’t even close to what Netflix produces,” the group said in a file attached to S02E07 of The Good Fight released on Sunday. “Netflix is able to produce drastic visual improvements with their H265 encodes compared to H264 across every original. In comparison, Amazon can’t decide whether H265 or H264 is going to produce better results, and as a result we suffer for it.”

An expert in video encoding that TorrentFreak spoke with took things further into the technical realm, but the upshot is that the stream quality has been cut in half in a way that looks to be an attempt to serve videos at reduced bandwidth. We still can only guess, because Amazon isn't talking. Unlike the pirate community, however.

With the situation failing to improve during the week, by the time piracy group DEFLATE released S03E14 of Supergirl on Tuesday their original criticism had transformed into flat-out insults.

“These are only being done in H265 because Amazon have shit the bed, and it’s a choice between a turd sandwich and a giant douche,” they wrote, offering these images as illustrative of the problem and these indicating what should be achievable.

With DEFLATE advising customers to start complaining to Amazon, the memes have already begun, with unfavorable references to now-defunct group YIFY (which was often chastized for its low quality rips) and even a spin on one of the most well known anti-piracy campaigns.

As of the past few days, it seems that Amazon has made changes on its end, restoring the original quality of Prime's streams. The company is still refusing to provide any kind of explanation as to why any of this happened to begin with, but it seems quite clear that without the pirating community calling them out, Amazon's customer service claims that all issues were at the end-user and not with the stream itself would have been accepted for much longer, if not indefinitely. Without the pirate hobbyists, they would have gotten away with it.

AT&T and Verizon have enjoyed a stranglehold over fixed and mobile residential broadband for years. They also enjoy a relative monopoly over broadband business data services, a market that services everything from cellular tower backhaul to ATMs. Given that both companies have a rich, deep history of engaging in all manner of dubious behavior to keep these markets as uncompetitive as possible, there would be absolutely no shortage of ammunition for regulators seeking to punish them on antitrust grounds.

Given that both companies are politically powerful campaign contributors, that generally doesn't happen, regardless of the party in power.

Which is why it's arguably entertaining to see the same Trump administration that has made it easier than ever for these companies to behave anti-competitively (net neutrality, privacy) conducting an investigation into whether AT&T and Verizon colluded to making switching carriers more difficult than it needs to be:

"The Justice Department has opened an antitrust investigation into potential coordination by AT&T, Verizon and a telecommunications standards organization to hinder consumers from easily switching wireless carriers, according to six people with knowledge of the inquiry."

At the heart of the controversy is eSIM, a technology that's supposed to make it easier than ever to switch carriers without consumers needing to buy and install a new SIM card. With eSIM, user identification technology of a traditional SIM card is instead transferred to the device's processor or modem itself. Ideally, that could let a consumer switch carriers within just a few seconds. Given that AT&T and Verizon have increasingly been losing customers to T-Mobile, they apparently worked with an industry standards group to try and defeat one of the central advantages of the technology:

"The technology lets people remotely switch wireless providers without having to insert a new SIM card into a device. AT&T and Verizon face accusations that they colluded with the G.S.M.A. to try to establish standards that would allow them to lock a device to their network even if it had eSIM technology."

Ironically this is probably among the least egregious offenses these companies have engaged in during their thirty year anti-competitive dominance, but it's an interesting paradigm shift all the same. And it's an indication that Trump DOJ antitrust head Makan Delrahim isn't the same sort of blind corporatist ideologue we've seen stumbling around elsewhere in the administration (FCC boss Ajit Pai comes quickly to mind). Delrahim's the same guy spearheading the Trump administration's opposition to AT&T's latest megamerger, a move some wondered might have been motivated by cronyism, not consumer welfare.

But with this move there's indications that Delrahim might genuinely be concerned about consumer welfare, a notable standout for an administration that's been tripping over itself to make life easier than ever for companies trying to behave anti-competitively on the broadcast and telecom fronts, whether that's the gutting of media consolidation rules to Sinclair's specific benefit, to gutting net neutrality just so regional telecom monopolies can distort a level playing field and further cash in on a lack of last-mile broadband competition.

Granted American history suggests it's more than likely this inquiry goes nowhere (Verizon says it's just a "difference of opinion,") but it's still interesting to see at least one member of the Trump administration not actively making media consolidation and monopoly power problems worse.

Hopefully nothing will come of this, but one should never underestimate the creativity of city attorneys presented with the opportunity to rack up billable hours.

Yet another Los Angeles city councilman has taken Waze to task for creating "dangerous conditions" in his district, and the politician is now "asking the City to review possible legal action."

[...]

In a new letter sent to the City Attorney’s Office, [Councilman David] Ryu formally asked Los Angeles’ top attorney to examine Waze’s behavior.

While Ryu said he supported "advances in technology," he decried Waze and its parent company, Google, for refusing "any responsibility for the traffic problems their app creates or the concerns of residents and City officials."

The city's government believes the traffic/mapping app has made Los Angeles' congestion worse. That the very body tasked with finding solutions to this omnipresent L.A. problem is looking to hold a private third party company responsible for its own shortcomings isn't surprising. If a third-party app can't create better traffic flow, what chance do city planners have? But beyond the buck-passing on congestion, the city may have a point about Waze making driving around Los Angeles a bit more hazardous.

For several months, it's been noted that Waze has been sending drivers careening down the steepest grade in the city -- Baxter Street. Drivers seeking routes around Glendale Ave. traffic choke points have been routed to a street with a 32% grade, increasing the number of accidents located there and generally resulting in barely-controlled mayhem. When any sort of precipitation falls from the sky, the city goes insane. Drivers bypassing Glendale are now hurtling down a steep, water-covered hill, compounding the problem.

It's become noticeable enough that the city government has approached Waze/Google in the recent past, asking for an algorithmic change to prevent drivers from being routed to Baxter. These efforts were met with a reasonable response from Google.

"Google Maps models the ever-changing real world by mapping for ground truth," the company said. "This means that our map reflects any measures taken by local agencies to protect their citizens—for example, blocking off a steep road, or implementing turn restrictions. Should the local agency decide to restrict Baxter Street, this change will be taken into account when routing drivers through the Los Angeles area."

The city finds this response -- one that says the city should do something about limiting access to Baxter Street if driving on it is inherently dangerous -- unreasonable. These are the words of Councilman Paul Krekorian.

"[Google has] not demonstrated any willingness to engage," he told Ars last week. "It goes to the heart of problems—that’s not [the] good corporate citizenship I expect."

Yes, but "engage" how? The city believes the algorithm can be rewritten to exclude Baxter Street from suggested routes without screwing things up elsewhere. Residents of Baxter Street want even more -- for it to be erased from Google's map.

This is nothing more than a city looking to offload problems of its own making. I suppose the addition of a cautionary note when rerouting to Baxter wouldn't be that much of a problem to implement, but that shouldn't even necessarily be something Google needs to handle. The Waze app allows drivers to add notes about streets, traffic, etc. so it's highly likely motorists are being warned about the steep grade but choosing to take their chances anyway.

I'm not sure where the city wants to go with this, but that hasn't stopped it from tasking its attorney from trying to find some way to punish Google for city's long-running congestion problems. Google isn't part of the city government, isn't asked to participate in city planning efforts, cannot control access to the city's streets, and has no way of forcing drivers to take only certain routes. This is all stuff only the city can address, and it's decided to make it someone else's problem.

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Earlier this month I talked a little bit about "Facebook Derangement Syndrome" in which the company, which has real and serious issues, is getting blamed for other stuff. It's fun to take potshots at Facebook, and we can talk all we want about the actual problems Facebook has (specifically its half-hearted attempts at transparency and user control), but accusing the company of all sorts of things that are not actually a problem doesn't help. It actually makes it that much harder to fix things.

The latest case in point. Zack Whittaker, who is one of the absolute best cybersecurity reporters out there, had a story up recently on ZDNet about a data mining firm called Localblox, that was pulling all sorts of info to create profiles on people... leaking 48 million profiles by failing to secure an Amazon S3 instance (like so many such Amazon AWS leaks, this one was spotted by Chris Vickery at Upgard, who seems to spot leaks from open S3 instances on weekly basis).

There is a story here and Whittaker's coverage of it is good and thorough. But the story is in Localblox's crap security (though the company has tried to claim that most of those profiles were fake and just for testing). However, many people are using the story... to attack Facebook. Digital Trends claims that this story is "the latest nightmare for Facebook." Twitter users were out in force blaming Facebook.

But, if you look at the details, this is just Facebook Derangement Syndrome all over again. Localblox built up its data via a variety of means, but the Facebook data was apparently scraped. That is, it used its computers to scrape public information from Facebook accounts (and Twitter, LinkedIn, Zillow, elsewhere) and then combined that with other data, including voter rolls (public!) and other data brokers, to build more complete profiles. Now, it's perfectly reasonable to point out that combining all of this data can raise some privacy issues -- but, again, that's a Localblox issue if there's a real issue there, rather than a Facebook one.

And, this is clearly the kind of thing that Facebook actively tries to prevent. Remember, as we've covered, the company went on a legal crusade against another scraper company, Power.com, using the CFAA to effectively kill that company's useful service.

Here's why this kind of thing matters: if you blame Facebook for this kind of thing, then you actively encourage Facebook to go out of its way to block scraping or other efforts to free up user data. That means, it ends up giving Facebook more control over user data. Allowing scrapers of public info (again, the fact that this is public info is important) could actually limit Facebook's powers, and enable other companies to pop up and make use of the data inside Facebook to build other (competing) services. The ability to scrape Facebook would allow third parties to build tools to give users more control over their Facebook accounts.

But when we look on scraping of public info as somehow a "breach" of Facebook (which, again, is separate from the messed up nature of Localblox leaking data itself), we're pushing everyone towards a world where Facebook has more control, more dominance and less competition. And that should be the last thing that anyone (outside of Facebook) wants.

Apparently, you don't actually hate overpaying for cable, broadband and phone service. At least that's the takeaway from this bizarre editorial over at the Washington Post by columnist Megan McArdle. In it, McArdle ineffectively argues that while the rise in streaming video competition is great and all, over-paying your regional telecom monopoly is something we all secretly love.

The odd part is there's nothing in the piece that actually supports that argument, outside of logically-flimsy comparisons between telecom services and the crappy, free shampoo you get at hotels:

"When you book a hotel, you expect “complimentary” mattresses, sheets and towels, rather than renting each individually. When you go to a restaurant, you don’t pay extra to enjoy the use of a plate. And you get very testy indeed upon discovering that your bargain airline charges you to choose a seat or bring luggage. Bundling, it turns out, is valuable."

So one, "hotels are really nice to not charge you to rent sheets" isn't really an argument, it's just words kind of stapled together. Including some crap shampoo the company pays a pittance for in bulk isn't a "bundle," and it's not remotely comparable to the telecom and TV sectors, where consumers are often punished with higher prices when they try to buy standalone broadband and avoid services they don't want and may not be able to afford. Yet the Post rushes forward with that comparison undaunted:

"Bundling is especially valuable in businesses where fixed costs account for a disproportionate share of the total price. Once you’ve gone to the monstrous expense of building and staffing a hotel, providing extra amenities generates little additional cost while adding a great deal of value for the customer. And the same is true of cable. Much of the expense comes from laying and maintaining a wire to your house; adding another channel is relatively cheap."

That's misleading. In the States, Americans pay more than a long-list of developed nations for broadband and TV service. The cost of deployment was covered by rates and taxpayers decades ago (and covered, and covered) in most areas, and while there's certainly costs to maintain and support that infrastructure, profit margins on broadband (and phone service in particular) are arguably stellar. Phone service in the IP era in particular costs a pittance to provide, but prices for all three bundled services are artificially high thanks to limited competition in broadband and regulatory capture. Realities all ignored by the Post:

"Right now, cable companies sell you phone, Internet service and entertainment products, all of which share one wire, one maintenance operation and one customer service staff. Without those other services, the Internet division would have to cover all that overhead. So if you pay less for the entertainment, you’re probably going to have to pay more for connectivity."

Again, that's simply a bogus argument. TV profit margins are certainly getting squeezed as streaming erodes TV market share (which is why some smaller cable companies are considering only selling broadband), but broadband and phone revenues are as fat as they come. Just because an AT&T or Comcast customer decides to cut the cable cord doesn't mean the company has to charge you more money for other services. They charge you more money (usually in the form of usage caps and overage fees) because there's limited competition and they all but own many state and federal lawmakers.

From there, the piece settles into the lazy, trendy media hot take that cord cutting doesn't save you money anyway:

"Start adding up the cost of the subscriptions you’d need to replicate your current viewing habits, and you’ll quickly see that it looks...surprisingly like a cable bill."

We've noted time and time again how that claim ("when you sign up for every single streaming service you pay a lot of money!") doesn't hold water, and if you spend more than twenty seconds with real consumers they'll consistently tell you that cord cutting saves them plenty each and every month. All told, trying to argue that consumers really secretly love overpaying mammoth telecom and media monopolies is just a bizarre hill to die on, especially with so many other pressing issues of the day worth opining on.

A recently-released Inspector General's report shows the FBI didn't try as hard as it could to find a way into the San Bernardino shooter's locked iPhone. It appears FBI officials were more interested in obtaining a favorable court ruling than seeking technical assistance from anyone other than Apple, despite the DOJ's courtroom claims about time being of the essence.

This had a lot to do with the current FBI leadership. James Comey made fighting encryption his personal crusade -- one that has been carried forward by both the DOJ and the FBI's new director, Christopher Wray. Comey's new book about his government career -- one that came to an unceremonious end when President Trump fired him -- provides a few more details about his crusade against math and personal security.

A passage in Comey's new book briefly discusses his initial reaction to the news smartphone manufacturers would be moving to default encryption. Comey claims the Snowden leaks prompted a worldwide shift to encrypted communications before moving on to Apple and Google.

In September 2014, after a year of watching our legal capabilities diminish, I saw Apple and Google announce that they would be moving their mobile devices to default encryption. They announced it in such a way as to suggest -- at least to my ears -- that making devices immune to judicial orders was an important social value. This drove me crazy. I just couldn't understand how smart people could not see the social costs to stopping judges, in appropriate cases, from ordering access to electronic devices.

There's more to it than this, but this is from Comey's perspective. Part of the move to device encryption was due to pressure from legislators that phone companies "do more" to protect customers whose devices had been stolen. And some of it was probably backlash to the flow of Snowden leaks, showing the government had assembled a massive surveillance apparatus following the 9/11 attacks, turning tech companies into unwitting accomplices of the surveillance state.

As Comey sees it, the tech sector fails to comprehend the consequences of encrypted communications and devices because it only deals with the positive side of human connections.

The leaders of tech companies don't see the darkness the FBI sees. Our days are dominated by the hunt for people planning terrorist attacks, hurting children, and engaging in organized crime. We see humankind at its most depraved, day in and day out…

I found it appalling that the tech types couldn't see this. I would frequently joke with the FBI "Going Dark" team assigned to seek solutions, "Of course the Silicon Valley types don't see the darkness -- they live where it's sunny all the time and everybody is rich and smart." Theirs was a world where technology made human connections and relationships stronger.

Conversely, the FBI views any communications it can't see as suspect. It ignored solutions to engage in a courtroom battle over a phone that ultimately held nothing of interest. The FBI continues to push for a government solution to the problem -- a mandate it can wield in every situation. Under Comey's command, the FBI has shown it is unable to honestly hold an "adult" conversation about the issues. If officials like Comey feel tech companies are being deliberately obtuse, they cannot honestly argue the FBI isn't acting the same way.