Apple, China, and the FBI

David Pierson reports in the L.A. Times,

Apple Inc. has come out swinging in its pitched battle with the government on its home turf.

But when it comes to its second-largest market, China, the Cupertino, Calif., company has been far more accommodating.

Since the iPhone was officially introduced in China seven years ago, Apple has overcome a national security backlash there and has censored apps that wouldn't pass muster with Chinese authorities. It has moved local user data onto servers operated by the state-owned China Telecom and submits to security audits by Chinese authorities.

The approach contrasts with Apple's defiant stance against the FBI, which is heaping pressure on the company to decrypt an iPhone that belonged to San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook.

The years-long strategy in China is paying off at a crucial time. While sales of Apple products have flatlined or declined in the U.S., Europe and Japan, business in the company's greater China region continues to soar — to a record $59 billion last year. The Asian giant surpassed the U.S. last year as the No. 1 buyer of iPhones and could one day be the largest market for Apple Pay, the mobile payment platform that was rolled out for Chinese consumers last week.

But there's no guarantee the good times will continue rolling for Apple. Beijing is increasingly tightening the screws on foreign technology companies, having introduced strict laws aimed at policing the Internet and digital hardware.

The environment will get even tougher, Apple says, if the FBI prevails in seeking a so-called backdoor to Farook's phone. That could set a precedent for China's authoritarian leaders to demand the same in a country where Apple has never publicly defied orders.

"What's driving this is Apple's desire to persuade the global market, and particularly the China market, that the FBI can't just stroll in and ask for data," said James Lewis, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "I can't imagine the Chinese would tolerate end-to-end encryption or a refusal to cooperate with their police, particularly in a terrorism case."

Read more here.

Obama not happy at F.B.I. Director's "anti-Muslim" tone

DC Whispers reports that Obama and Jarrett are warning F.B.I. Director James Comey to avoid having an "anti-Muslim" tone in his public remarks.

If true, this is a scenario that appears to pit the Obama White House against FBI Director James Comey over what reports suggest is an increasingly divisive conflict between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Jarrett and federal law enforcement officials regarding feared pending ISIS terror threats inside of the United States.



Apparently Comey initially balked at the direct influence of the White House upon the operational freedoms FBI Directors are normally granted. This response initiated counter-measures by Valerie Jarrett herself who then dispatched Attorney General Loretta Lynch to the public briefing.



Lynch’s role is alleged to be the Obama White House’s watchdog over FBI Director Comey’s statements and subsequent response following the most recent Islamic terrorist attack. The impetus for this scenario is said to be two-fold:

**Mr. Obama and Ms. Jarrett are increasingly concerned over anti-Muslim rhetoric not only among the general population and politicians, but among federal, state, and local law enforcement officials who are increasingly concerned further threats to public safety might very well be imminent. They want this tone “corrected” immediately.

**Barack Obama is said to have asked during an earlier meeting regarding the San Bernardino terrorist attack how best they, “control the message on this.” Jarrett operatives have apparently already reached out to and continue to then remind supportive media figures to describe San Bernardino as a “shooting” and not connect it to Islamic terror.

The devil sitting on their shoulders, saying "kill, kill, kill."

Kevin Johnson writes in USA Today,

In a dramatic assessment of the domestic threat posed by the Islamic State, FBI Director James Comey said Thursday there are "hundreds, maybe thousands" of people across the country who are receiving recruitment overtures from the terrorist group or directives to attack the U.S.

Comey said the Islamic State, also known as ISIL, is leveraging social media in unprecedented ways through Twitter and other platforms, directing messages to the smartphones of "disturbed people'' who could be pushed to launch assaults on U.S. targets.

"It's like the devil sitting on their shoulders, saying 'kill, kill, kill,''' Comey said in a meeting with reporters.

...Bruce Hoffman, a longtime terrorism analyst and director of Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies, said in a recent interview that ISIL's multifaceted outreach and leveraging of social media is threatening to "outpace the government's capabilities across the intelligence community.''

"It's like the Dutch boy sticking his fingers in the dike,'' Hoffman said.

Indeed, Comey said that ISIL recruiters operating from safe havens in Syria are making initial contacts with recruits, mostly on Twitter, and are then "steering'' them into encrypted venues where their subsequent communications are "lost to us.''

"The haystack is the entire country,'' Comey said. "We are looking for the needles, but increasingly the needles are unavailable to us. ... This is the 'going dark' problem in living color. There are Elton Simpsons out there that I have not found and I cannot see.''

Comey said agents are working hundreds of investigations around the country involving suspected homegrown violent extremists.The director said the inquiries are open in all 56 of the FBI's field divisions.

Read more here.

Do we still have the Fourth Amendment?

Dustin Volz reports at National Journal that Google warns that

the government's quiet plan to expand the FBI's authority to remotely access computer files amounts to a "monumental" constitutional concern.

The search giant submitted public comments earlier this week opposing a Justice Department proposal that would grant judges more leeway in how they can approve search warrants for electronic data.

The push to change an arcane federal rule "raises a number of monumental and highly complex constitutional, legal, and geopolitical concerns that should be left to Congress to decide," wrote Richard Salgado, Google's director for law enforcement and information security.

The provision, known as Rule 41 of the federal rules of criminal procedure, generally permits judges to grant search warrants only within the bounds of their judicial district. Last year, the Justice Department petitioned a judicial advisory committee to amend the rule to allow judges to approve warrants outside their jurisdictions or in cases where authorities are unsure where a computer is located.

Google, in its comments, blasted the desired rule change as overly vague, saying the proposal could authorize remote searches on the data of millions of Americans simultaneously—particularly those who share a network or router—and cautioned it rested on shaky legal footing.

Read more here.

Putting a troublesome critic on ice

Have you been reading about the government's prosecution of Dinesh D'Souza, who made a popular documentary film that was critical of Barack Obama and has now been singled out for criminal prosecution? Apparently D'Souza made a $15,000 campaign contribution that the government believes was illegal. For that, D'Souza

has been paraded in handcuffs, made to post bail of half-a-million dollars and hand over his passport, and cannot travel internally within the United States without the permission of a judge,

writes Mark Steyn.

Steyn adds,

It's certainly an effective punishment, and not just because the malign alliance of a corrupt bureaucracy and a politicized judiciary is unlikely to end well for D'Souza. Years before the eventual outcome will be known, he will have to devote enormous amounts of time and money to fending off Obama's prosecutors that he would have been able to devote to making more movies and books critical of Obama. In effect, this is the government version of a SLAPP suit - a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. Obama puts a troublesome critic on ice, and mutes many others.

Four Senators are pushing back a little against the F.B.I. Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, Charles Grassley, and Jeff Sessions are all members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. They have written a letter to the head of the F.B.I.

Remember when the F.B.I. was respected?

What has happened to the F.B.I.? Congressmen Darrel Issa and Jim Jordan have stated that the F.B.I. has impeded a Congressional investigation and interfered with a Congressional Committee's (Committee on Oversight and Government Reform) access to documents and information. The Congressional Committee has given the F.B.I. Director until 5 p.m. on December 16 to produce documents the Committee has been requesting since September 6, 2013. The Congressmen remind the F.B.I. Director of the criminal penalties (fines and imprisonment) he faces if he continues to deny the Committee the information it is requesting, which pertains to the F.B.I.'s targeting of people and groups that believe in conservative political views.