Historic moment.
In an extraordinary news conference Monday afternoon, President Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro sparred over human rights, the Guantanamo prison and their views of their own countries and the world, even as both hailed Obama’s historic visit here as a new step in normalizing relations.
Democracy didn’t turn Tunisian youths into jihadis, but it gave them the freedom to act on their unhappiness. By raising and then frustrating expectations, the revolution created conditions for radicalization to thrive. New liberties clashed with the old habits of a police state—young Tunisians were suddenly permitted to join civic and political groups, but the cops harassed them for expressing dissent. Educated Tunisians are twice as likely to be unemployed as uneducated ones, because the economy creates so few professional jobs. A third of recent college graduates can’t find work. Frustration led young people to take to the streets in 2011; a similar desperate impulse is now driving other young people toward jihad. “You have a lot of people who have aspirations and can’t meet them,” Monica Marks, an American doctoral candidate who studies Islamist movements in the Middle East, said.
Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have championed democracy as the best way to stop the Arab world’s destructive oscillation between secular dictatorship and Islamist radicalism. Tom Malinowski, the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, said, “One of our articles of faith here—backed up by evidence, I hope—is that open societies are a bulwark against extremism, and that repression tends to make our task in fighting this menace harder.” There are almost no test cases in the Arab world other than Tunisia, and, at the very least, Tunisia complicates the idea. The country is not so much a model to be emulated as a problem to be solved.
At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. "You want to know what this was really all about?" he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
Two days before Christmas, a trust called DE First Holdings was quietly formed in Delaware, where corporations are required to reveal little about their workings. A day later, the entity dropped $1 million into a super PAC with ties to Jersey City, N.J., Mayor Steven Fulop, a Democrat considering a gubernatorial bid.
The trust, whose owner remains unknown, is part of a growing cadre of mystery outfits financing big-money super PACs. Many were formed just days or weeks before making six- or seven-figure contributions — an arrangement that election law experts say violates a long-standing federal ban on straw donors.
But the individuals behind the “ghost corporations” appear to face little risk of reprisal from a deeply polarized Federal Election Commission, which recently deadlocked on whether to even investigate such cases.
In modern America, it’s expensive to be poor. If you have a car, it’s old and habitually breaks down. Often, there aren’t banking services in your area and you must live with high-cost alternatives. And in white working-class towns decimated by years of outsourcing, the jobs available don’t provide the kind of wages to break the cycle of poverty.
That’s not to say the situation of the American poor hasn’t preoccupied policy-makers and the pundit class. Recently, there’s been a bipartisan grumbling among elite wonks that the poor should just rent a U-Haul and leave their depressed communities if they want a better life. (Their dismissive attitude is presumably because America is extremely economically segregated; rich and poor hardly need to associate with one another.)...
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While moving to where jobs are more plentiful would be a good strategy for those in high-unemployment areas, we know that the Americans have less mobility—economic and geographic—than they did in previous decades. Geographic migration data from the U.S. Census Bureau finds that the percentage of Americans who move to a different state or a different county within the same state has plummeted by nearly half since the 1980s. As Justin Fox points out at Bloomberg, it’s even worse for white Americans with no college education, a rough approximate of the working-class whites derided for their supposed lack of initiative. Poorer Americans are now more likely to stay put. To put it simply, they don’t have enough money to move.
CLARKE: Well, I don't think it's a fierce debate. I think the Justice Department and the FBI are on their own here. You know, the secretary of defense has said how important encryption is when asked about this case. The National Security Agency director and three past National Security Agency directors, a former CIA director, a former Homeland Security secretary have all said that they're much more sympathetic with Apple in this case. You really have to understand that the FBI director is exaggerating the need for this and is trying to build it up as an emotional case, organizing the families of the victims and all of that. And it's Jim Comey and the attorney general is letting him get away with it.
GREENE: So if you were still inside the government right now as a counterterrorism official, could you have seen yourself being more sympathetic with the FBI in doing everything for you that it can to crack this case?
CLARKE: No, David. If I were in the job now, I would have simply told the FBI to call Fort Meade, the headquarters of the National Security Agency, and NSA would have solved this problem for them. They're not as interested in solving the problem as they are in getting a legal precedent.
...In theory at least, intelligence and law enforcement agreed to accept the fact that crypto was here to stay, and if they wanted to gain access to encrypted communications and files, they would do so by warrants and their own cryptanalysis, and not by demanding that the systems themselves should be weakened.
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Three big things have happened since the first round of the Crypto Wars. First, of course, was 9/11. The second was the Snowden revelations, which exposed how the government had stepped up its surveillance of communications, greatly increasing its cache of private information despite the existence of crypto. And the third, definitely related to factor two, was the explosion of new technologies — notably the iPhone and its progeny — that put even more of our personal information in the cloud. (In 2001, Google was just getting started.) All of these things make the stakes much higher this time around.
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...Once again, the government is seeking to control that genie first released by Diffie and Hellman. But the physics of computer security have not changed. Last July, a panel of fifteen eminent security specialists and cryptographers — many of whom are veterans of the first crypto war — released a report confirming there was no way for the government to demand a means of bypassing encryption without a dire compromise of security. It just doesn’t work.
That’s why it’s so disappointing that the FBI, Justice Department and others in law enforcement are pressing us to turn back the clock to a less-secure time and less-secure technologies. They have suggested that the safeguards of iOS 7 were good enough and that we should simply go back to the security standards of 2013. But the security of iOS 7, while cutting-edge at the time, has since been breached by hackers. What’s worse, some of their methods have been productized and are now available for sale to attackers who are less skilled but often more malicious.
To get around Apple’s safeguards, the FBI wants us to create a backdoor in the form of special software that bypasses passcode protections, intentionally creating a vulnerability that would let the government force its way into an iPhone. Once created, this software — which law enforcement has conceded it wants to apply to many iPhones — would become a weakness that hackers and criminals could use to wreak havoc on the privacy and personal safety of us all.