http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2016/02/18/what_the_fbi_really_wants_from_appleWhat the FBI Really Wants from Apple
February 18, 2016
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BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: The story with Apple and the terrorists' iPhone 5c and the FBI, the White House is weighing in on it. I think there needs to be some further explanation about what's really going on here, folks. Because it's become a PR battle, and it looks like Apple is gonna lose this, and it's gonna be very tough to win because here we have a terrorist's cell phone, and law enforcement wants in it and to find out what else might be planned, who else might be involved.
And it's very tough to stand up for citizens' privacy rights when the FBI and the White House say, "Hey, it's just that one phone! Don't panic here. All we want is that one phone!" But that's not all they want. That's not all. This is the federal government making a move on a private corporation. And this was a strategically planned -- this was a specifically chosen event by the FBI. In fact, I don't even think what's on this phone is the real target for the FBI and the government. I think it's just the way they're getting in.
And just to set the table -- and I'll come back later and give you details of this. The best way that I have found to explain to people what's going on here, is instead of this being a cell phone in possession of a dead terrorist, or a terrorist -- a dead terrorist's cell phone -- think of it as a safe in the terrorist's house. And think of it as a six-number combination safe, although the number of twists and turns really are not relevant for the discussion here.
The government says, "No, no, no! We just want that one safe. We, the government, just want the safe company to crack that one safe. We want them to give us the combination to that one safe."
And everybody says, "Well, fine. What's wrong with that? The terrorists are dead. Who knows what's in that safe? Let's go in there and get it!"
But that's not what they're asking for, and I'll detail this in a moment. What the FBI is asking for is for the manufacturer -- the safe company -- to give them the combinations of every safe they have made and will make. That is essentially what the government, the FBI is asking of Apple.
"Give us the key that will allow us to crack any phone." Now, they're not saying that, but that's going to be the ended result if the FBI wins this. And they probably will.
Because I don't care how big Apple is: When the full force of the government comes at you, there's any number of ways they can get what they want, and they can maybe structure it in such a way so that Apple appears to be hanging tough and hanging tough and hanging tough. And so they get the PR value of really hanging tough and trying to defend their customers, and at the end of the day they cave to it. More than likely, that's going to happen. For all of you people concerned about privacy and security, this is one of the biggest -- I don't know -- contradictions or dilemmas.
I mean, I hear from people all the time paranoid, scared to death that the NSA's tracking them. The NSA's listening to their phone calls. The NSA is activating the cameras on their phones and watching them. Particularly Millennials don't like any of this invasion-of-privacy stuff. But all of a sudde,n everybody is demanding Apple give up and let the FBI into "this one phone." It's just curious, because when you dig into this and find out, it's not just "this one phone," and I don't even think it's this phone that's really the ultimate, long-term target.
The FBI has been trying to get Apple to give them the code or the keys to break peer-to-peer encryption. That's really what they want. They want to be able to decrypt your messages, your e-mails. And they need to get into your phones to be able to do that. In fact, look at... This is, I think, an interesting way to look at this. Look at how differently a publicly traded company views the security of its customers compared to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and agents of the federal government.
Look at how they protect, try to guarantee the safety and security of the citizens.
Wouldn't it be nice if Obama and Hillary were doing everything they could to protect the American people from all of these threats from an open border, from Mexico, from ISIS? All of these migrants, all of these refugees, you think that's not a security breach? You think those are not security breaches waiting to happen? Can you believe Apple is doing and appears to care much more about the privacy and security of their customers than the United States government seems to care about the privacy, security, and what have you, of American citizens?
Look how Hillary treated America's secrets on her off-the-grid e-mail server. Look at all the top secret data she was trafficking in, all the top secret documents, e-mails, and so forth. Her e-mail server wasn't secure. And it wasn't just hers, was it? "Hey, we just want in on this one phone," says Josh Earnest. "We just want in that one phone. We don't want any others." Yeah, it was just one Hillary e-mail server. Well, who else was she dealing with? Who else was able to traffic in these documents that Hillary was trafficking in?
Who else had similar setups and so forth? The irony on this is that Tim Cook is probably gonna vote for people like Hillary or Bernie Sanders or what have you, and they want to seize his company. If you listen to Bernie, listen to Hillary, Cook's company and companies like his are the problem. They're the enemy. Yet Tim Cook -- who's doing a greater job protecting the security and privacy of his own customers -- is gonna vote for people that blow it up for everybody else.
A well-known professional golfer sent me a little story going around in the professional golf world today. It's an attempt to illustrate to people who might be attracted to Bernie Sanders (for whatever reason) to understand what Bernie's actually proposing with his 90% tax rate. And it's very simple. You go into a pro shop and you want to buy a ball marker to mark your ball on the green. So you ask the guy at the pro shop, "How much is the ball marker?" The guy says, "It's a dollar." You hand over your dollar, and he gives you a dime as your ball marker.
That's Bernie Sanders' tax policy.
He's gonna take $1 from you and give you back 10¢.
It's a great way to illustrate for people what Bernie Sanders' tax policy is all about.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: No, no, no, no. I don't care what you've heard or what you think you know. I'm gonna stick with my safe analogy here. Forget we're talking about a cell phone. Think of it as a safe. The FBI is not asking Apple to go to the terrorists' house and open it with the combination they know the safe has and then let the FBI look around. The FBI is asking for the combination.
The FBI is asking the company that makes the safes to give them the combinations of all the safes that they have made and will make in the future, because they don't want to have to go to Apple every time they need to get inside some potential criminal's phone. They want the key. They are using a 200-year-old law called the All Writs Act, w-r-i-t-s, which is a law that compels private companies to help the government in law enforcement primarily, but other endeavors as well.
The argument here is does the All Writs Act enable the government to tell a private company that it must weaken itself, that it must build vulnerabilities into its product? In the case of Apple, Apple has made a big deal out of the fact that if you own an iPhone, nobody's getting in it unless you let 'em, or unless you screw up and somehow don't use the systems they provide. But nobody's breaking into your phone. And in the case of a lot of applications, there is encryption both ways, from the sender to the recipient and back, and even if somebody gets in your phone, they're not gonna be able to crack your communications because it's encrypted and nobody has the key to decrypt it.
The FBI wants all of that, but they're claiming they want it for just one phone. And they want the data. They want the key. They don't want Apple to come in and open the phone. They want to do it themselves. That means they have to be given the key. Well, okay, so the FBI has the key. Then other law enforcement gets the key. By the time the first week is over hundreds of thousands of law enforcement people have the key to get into iOS devices. You think one of them is not gonna leak it, one of them is not gonna make a mistake, one of them not gonna see to it that it ends up in the hands of some bad guy? I mean, it is highly likely that this scenario could play out if Apple is made to give up the ownership of the combination to all of their safes.
But there's more to this, and I'll get into it later. I'm not doing it now 'cause I don't think it's a priority in terms of everything we're talking about here. But that's basically what this is about. And again, I need to draw the comparison, the analogy. I mean, look at the lengths to which a private-sector American business is going to protect the privacy and security of its customers compared to the federal government's efforts in that area. And they don't compare. You remember the hack not long ago that the ChiComs and the Russians are now in possession of the federal records of over 20 million government employees.
Remember that hack? Remember hearing about that? How about the IRS and Lois Lerner and all these people digging deep into private tax return data and leaking that and then using the leaks to deny tax-exempt status to otherwise qualified applicants? It's not even a comparison.
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