Apple vs FBI: What the FBI Wants


Wednesday’s New York Times carried a story describing the interactions among the FBI, San Bernardino County, and Apple. The article confirmed what I reported a while back: the FBI screwed up and managed to lock the iCloud account. But that’s not the most important part of the story.  A related story, buried on page 4 of the business section, revealed what the FBI wants.

A second article noted that a number of government officials attended this year’s RSA conference. Despite the tarnished reputation, this event remains a popular venue for technology security experts to get together and share ideas.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch

Attorney General Loretta Lynch

[pullquote]“For me, the middle ground” is to do “what the law requires,” Ms. Lynch responded, which drew a smattering of laughter and hisses from the audience.[/pullquote]

This year, one of the attendees was the Attorney General of the United States, Ms. Loretta Lynch. After much discussion of finding a “middle ground” between the government and Apple, Bloomberg reporter Emily Chang   asked Ms. Lynch her definition of that phrase. From the Times story ↵

In other words, the “my way or the highway” attitude of the Obama administration remains securely in place. And they wonder why so many companies have filed amicus briefs supporting Apple.  The latest, as of today, is Box.com

Engadget.com says these companies are supporting Apple:

Twitter, Airbnb, eBay, GitHub, Kickstarter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Square, Squarespace, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, AT&T, Amazon, and Intel.

Talk about a motley crew.  Did you ever think you’d see this group of companies agreeing on anything?  By the way, Engadget is trying to maintain the canonical list.  You can contact reporter Billy Steele on Twitter @wmsteele.


About Tony Lima

Tony Lima has been working with technology, economic modeling, forecasting, and market research for 40 years. His background makes him uniquely qualified to navigate this varied landscape. Begin with his education: B.S. in chemical engineering from M.I.T. , M.B.A. from Harvard, Ph.D. in economics from Stanford. His day job was professor of economics at California State University, East Bay. He retired in 2016 to devote his time to consulting and writing. But he has found time to: write (eight books and over 100 articles ranging from wine economics to detailed analyses of meta-language code generators) consult with companies ranging from Microsoft to CEDEX keep his expertise up-to-date, constantly reading and sorting through the avalanche of information available daily maintain three blogs: Wine Research, Wine Economics, and Economic Policy Local policy analysis: Los Altos Politico.com

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