San Bernardino terror, the FBI, Apple, and John McAffee

John McAfee is an antivirus software founder running for president in the US as a member of the Libertarian Party. He wrote an op-ed and gave permission to Business Insider to reprint it. Here are some of his most points.

Using an obscure law, written in 1789 — the All Writs Act — the US government has ordered Apple to place a back door into its iOS software so the FBI can decrypt information on an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters.

It has finally come to this. After years of arguments by virtually every industry specialist that back doors will be a bigger boon to hackers and to our nation's enemies than publishing our nuclear codes and giving the keys to all of our military weapons to the Russians and the Chinese, our government has chosen, once again, not to listen to the minds that have created the glue that holds this world together.

This is a black day and the beginning of the end of the US as a world power. The government has ordered a disarmament of our already ancient cybersecurity and cyberdefense systems, and it is asking us to take a walk into that near horizon where cyberwar is unquestionably waiting, with nothing more than harsh words as a weapon and the hope that our enemies will take pity at our unarmed condition and treat us fairly.

...The FBI, in a laughable and bizarre twist of logic, said the back door would be used only once and only in the San Bernardino case.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, replied:

The government suggests this tool could only be used once, on one phone. But that's simply not true. Once created, the technique could be used over and over again, on any number of devices. In the physical world, it would be the equivalent of a master key, capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks — from restaurants and banks to stores and homes. No reasonable person would find that acceptable.

The government is asking Apple to hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers — including tens of millions of American citizens — from sophisticated hackers and cybercriminals. The same engineers who built strong encryption into the iPhone to protect our users would, ironically, be ordered to weaken those protections and make our users less safe.

...The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor. And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control.

...And why do the best hackers on the planet not work for the FBI? Because the FBI will not hire anyone with a 24-inch purple mohawk, 10-gauge ear piercings, and a tattooed face who demands to smoke weed while working and won't work for less than a half-million dollars a year. But you bet your ass that the Chinese and Russians are hiring similar people with similar demands and have been for many years. It's why we are decades behind in the cyber race.

So here is my offer to the FBI. I will, free of charge, decrypt the information on the San Bernardino phone, with my team. We will primarily use social engineering, and it will take us three weeks. If you accept my offer, then you will not need to ask Apple to place a back door in its product, which will be the beginning of the end of America.

Read more here.

The Left's tactical alliance with radical Islam

John Hayward writes at Breitbart about the

Left’s tactical alliance with radical Islam, a way of letting them know American liberals were fully on board with their quest to restrict the free-speech rights of U.S. citizens. A transaction was offered: we’ll give Islamists pride of place in our new speech-control regime, in exchange for political support. It’s the deal of the century for us, because we’re giving up nothing of value. We weren’t interested in drawing cartoons of Mohammed or insulting Islam anyway.

...Mrs. Jihad waltzed right through Obama’s vaunted “screening” process, the one he says American voters are bigots and fools to express reservations about, when it comes to flooding the United States with Syrian refugees. Mr. Jihad somehow eluded the all-seeing eye of our trillion-dollar Surveillance State, even though he was chatting with terrorists online and checking out ISIS propaganda. The killers swore fealty to the Islamic State at literally the same moment Obama was offering confident assurances ISIS could never pull off a Paris-style terror attack in the United States. Confronted with these failures, the Democrat Party – to a man and woman – has absolutely no idea what to do, other than smear law-abiding Americans who had nothing whatsoever to do with the crime.

And that’s where the raw, slavering hatred comes in. It’s palpable right now. The Left hates decent Americans so very, very much. They hate your religion, your independence, your stubborn refusal to submit. They hate your prosperity, your resourcefulness, and your refusal to believe their fairy tales about an Almighty State that can take care of everyone’s needs in a fair and just manner. They hate that you keep noticing their failures. They hate that you won’t let them import a more pliable electorate from other countries without putting up a fight. They’re furious that you won’t accept their sacred religious belief that everything is your fault, and you deserve generations of punishment for the sins of your fathers.

The very first reaction of liberals – the knee-jerk response of lefties with keyboards and Internet connections – was to attack Christians for daring to offer “thoughts and prayers” for the victims of the shooting. They did so with a speed and volume that strongly suggests coordinated effort.

These same liberals rushed to hold every pro-lifer, and indeed every Christian and Republican, in America responsible for the crazed actions of Robert Dear in Colorado. They were still pounding out op-eds along those lines when police scanners in California lit up with the name “Farook,” and it suddenly became necessary to spin on a dime and insist the ideology, religion, and political objectives of murderers are entirely irrelevant.

The New York Times headlined its profile of the Colorado lunatic, “For Robert Dear, Religion and Rage Before Planned Parenthood Attack.” Think they’ll be using a headline like that for the San Bernardino couple? “For Farook and Malik, Religion and Rage Before Christmas-Party Attack.” Of course not, because the Left has issued a fatwa that religion has nothing whatsoever to do with Islamist terrorism.

The Left is most focused and direct in their hatred of your guns, my fellow Americans, because they are a symbolic representation of everything else that is wrong with you. The Second Amendment (and, increasingly, the First) are viewed by liberals as archaic, irrational barriers against their power. They are united in their contempt for the idea that Government, the divine incarnation of Law and the General Will, could be restrained by laws. How can the makers of law be subject to it? Why, the very idea is perverse! When smart people with big hearts see the urgent need to Do the Right Thing and enact Common-Sense Laws, they should face no centuries-old speed bumps, or listen to modern-day libertarians whining about “due process.”

That’s how you get to the New York Times running an editorial that due process and the Second Amendment should simply be ignored at this moment of crisis. That’s how you get the emerging liberal dogma that Congress can be ignored, after refusing to give a far-Left President what he wants after repeated demands. The Constitution is anathema to the Left’s preferred system of government-by-crisis, in which they get to define the crises, and the “solution” always involves compromising the liberty of law-abiding citizens.

Guns are also an unacceptable totem of skepticism for the sacred State. Gun owners are frank about their desire to protect themselves, and their families, in the absence of police, who are rarely able to arrive at a crime scene in time to save every victim, despite their most sincere efforts. This is absolutely unacceptable to the Left, which views dead law-abiding citizens as acceptable collateral damage – indeed, they’re practically human sacrifices to the god of the State. (Elite liberals hold this belief, in part, because they’re convinced they personally will not be sacrificed, especially when they have armed personal guards.)

At this point, it should be clear that nothing terrifies Democrats more than the possibility that the next terror attack will be thwarted by an armed citizen. That would be absolute narrative apocalypse for them. They’ve put a lot of effort into cooking up phony statistics and writing tortured reports to “prove” that guns in the hands of lawful citizens are a net minus to public safety. If the next Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik take two in the chest from some NRA member with a concealed-carry permit… why, it would ruin hundreds of carefully-prepared Democrat gun control speeches!

If something like that happens, the Good Guy With a Gun had better be prepared for the mother of all online vettings – a hundred times more energetic than anything Democrats would demand for a presidential candidate from their own Party – and God help the hero if he ever said anything derogatory about Islam in public or online.

There’s an old joke about a drunk who insists on searching for his lost car keys beneath a streetlamp, even though he knows he didn’t drop them there, because the light is better. That’s how the Left predictably reacts at a moment like this: they make a feral lunge for the nearest group of law-abiding American citizens with politics they dislike. Power is most easily deployed against the law-abiding; statist threats work best against people with something to lose. Hate screeds are most easily written against people who have been culturally gagged from responding. Team Obama is worse than useless against terrorists, but they excel at threatening Americans who dare to use their Constitutional rights in disapproved ways.

Fighting Islamist terrorism is hard, as years of Obama’s failure can attest. Beating up good Christians and the NRA is easy, fun, and profitable. When a pair of well-prepared Islamist terrorists launches a planned attack on a Christmas party with pipe bombs and guns, the problems to be attacked are obviously the Christmas party and guns. That other stuff is too difficult to discuss, and it’s too obviously a result of Big Government failure.

The most incompetent President in American history, the man whose multi-trillion-dollar government can’t launch a website, demands absolute faith and the scourging of unbelievers. His demands grow more strident as they become more absurd. Innocent American citizens will be sacrificed to his true religion, the religion of the State — unless he and his Party are confronted and decisively defeated.

Read more here.

Do you feel safe?

Do you feel safe from ISIS? That is one of the questions Ben Shapiro asks at Breitbart.

Obama Said You Were Safe From ISIS. On the day before ISIS terrorists attacked Paris, Obama said, “We have contained them.” On the day of the San Bernardino ISIS-inspired terrorist attack, Obama assured Americans that they were safe from ISIS. He told CBS, “ISIL will not pose an existential threat to us…The American people should feel confident that, you know, we are going to be able to defend ourselves and make sure that, you know, we have a good holiday and go about our lives.” He said that at the same time that one of the San Bernardino terrorists, Tashfeen Malik, pledged her allegiance to ISIS on Facebook. At the same exact time.

Obama Said You Could Trust The Government To Screen Immigrants. President Obama has derisively mocked Republicans for wariness over the government’s ability to screen Syrian Muslim refugees. Obama says that we have a thorough screening process for Syrian Muslim refugees; he scoffed at GOP critics: “Apparently, they’re scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America as part of our tradition of compassion.”

One of the San Bernardino terrorists, Malik, was in the country on a K-1 visa. That visa allows holders to come to the United States to get married, and as Breitbart reported, the State Department says that the K-1 visa does require that the fiancée “must meet some of the requirements of an immigrant visa.”

Oopsies.

Obama Thinks The Government Is Great At Tracking Down Terror Leads. President Obama repeatedly assures us that the government is doing amazing work in tracking down anti-terror leads. Surely that’s true. That doesn’t mean you’re safe. The FBI didn’t have Syed Farook on a watch list or a no-fly list, even though according to CNN, he was “in touch with people being investigated by the FBI for international terrorism, law enforcement officials said Thursday.” The suspects were watching ISIS propaganda online.

Because the Obama administration doesn’t take Islamic terrorism seriously – climate change is far more important – they have a long history of ignoring terror information. As Joel Pollak points out, the Obama administration still has not exploited the intelligence value of information obtained during the bin Laden raid, and they left the Benghazi consulate completely open after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2012, risking intelligence assets in the process.

Obama Thinks Taking Your Guns Will Stop Terrorists. Josh Earnest said yesterday that gun control was the best way to stop terrorists. Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked if Obama thought gun control could deter terrorism; Earnest explained, “Yes. The president believes that passing common sense gun laws that makes it harder for people with bad intentions to get guns, makes the country safer.” But we know that the San Bernardino terrorists bought their guns legally, then modified them in illegal fashion. They also had IEDs. California has some of the strictest gun control in the nation. That fact led Senator Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) (D-CA) to declare, idiotically, that “Sensible gun laws work. We’ve proven it in California and we are not going to give up.” She said this the day after the shooting in San Bernardino that prompted the conversation in the first place – the day after a bunch of unarmed people were shot while waiting four minutes for the cops to arrive.

Democrats Think They Can Disarm You Without Due Process. Well, over the past two days, Democrats have made it their chief talking point to blast Republicans for their failure to support removing guns from those on the terror watch list and no-fly list without due process of law.

...Neither Malik nor Farook were on the no-fly list or the terror watch list. There are, however, some 750,000 Americans on those lists. It requires no show of evidence to put someone on the list. But according to the left, mere presence on the list means we can remove guns from you in violation of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.

The Department of Justice Thinks Its Top Priority Is Prosecution of “Anti-Muslim” Speech.

The Media Don’t Care About Your Safety. The media keep parroting the administration’s lies about keeping Americans safe, but they couldn’t care less about that. Today, they demonstrated their willingness to enter the apartment of terrorists, without official permission, destroying evidence in their wake. As CNN ‘s law enforcement analyst said while watching all of this happen:

I don’t see any fingerprint dust on the walls where they went in there and checked for fingerprints for other people that might have been connected with these two. You’ve got documents laying all over the place; you’ve got shredded documents…You have passports, you’ve got drivers’ licenses — now you have thousands of fingerprints all over inside this crime scene…I am so shocked, I cannot believe it.

Read more here.

The "Gun Epidemic"

At The Corner Jonah Goldberg gives the New York Times a lesson in writing:

The Peace of Versailles, Buck v. Bell, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor,* the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Ukrainian famine, the internment of Japanese-Americans, the Tuskegee experiments, the Holocaust, McCarthyism, the Marshall Plan, Jim Crow, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy Assassination, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Kent State, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Watergate, withdrawal from Vietnam, the Killing Fields, the Iran hostage crisis, the Contras, AIDS, gay marriage, the Iran nuclear deal: These are just a few of the things the New York Times chose not to run front page editorials on.

But, the “Gun Epidemic” in America? That deserves a front-page editorial. Not only that, it deserves to be bragged about that this is the first time since 1920 they’ve run a front page editorial. It begins: ​It is a moral outrage and national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency.

A few points: First, you’d think it would be better written, given the pomposity of it all. Second, you’d think there would be an actual gun epidemic to justify this break from precedent. Gun murders, as Charlie Cooke keeps pointing out, keep going down. That is not to say that the prevalence of spree or mass killings isn’t a serious issue. Such slaughters, separate and apart from the Islamist threat, are extremely troubling and both parties should do more to address them. But given that gun ownership has skyrocketed while gun homicides have gone down, it’s hard to see how the premise of the editorial — never mind its nearly unprecedented placement — can be defended.

Third, while I have no doubt the authors are sincere in their desire to mount a national movement against guns (I also have no doubt they’ll fail), it is impossible to read this as anything other than an attempt to change the subject in the face of all the facts we learned today. These include, off the top of my head: This was a terrorist attack, the most deadly since 9/11. The killers were inspired by ISIS, a group the president has insisted is “contained” and only last week said posed no threat to the homeland. No remotely plausible gun-control reforms would have prevented the Farooks from killing people. The immigrant screening process let Jihadi murderer, Malik Tafsheen, into the United States despite the fact she gave a fake address.

This happened at a moment when the president — and the New York Times – have insisted time and again that concerns about Syrian refugees amount to little more than xenophobia and know-nothingism. One hour before the FBI confirmed this was a terrorist attack the White House still refused to describe it as one. This fact is particularly salient given that the president has always downplayed, diminished, disregarded, and dismissed concerns about terrorism in America. He simply doesn’t want Americans to sweat terrorism. But he does want Americans to sweat guns.

And so does the New York Times. So, by all means, this is exactly the moment to break a 95-year precedent and run a front-page editorial making the case for reforms that would not have prevented these murders, have no chance of passing Congress, and detract from the most pressing issues of the moment. Well done, Gray Lady, well done. * I added Pearl Harbor after I originally posted this because, well, Pearl Harbor.Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/NYT-Epic-Gun-Fail

Can America awaken to the threat?

Suzann Darnell writes at Wooly Mammoth,

A Little Southern (California) Comfort

“. . . mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort, . . .” (from Mosiah 18:9, Book of Mormon)

Tears of sorrow amidst this season of joy. Truly this is how those in San Bernardino, California must feel after the terrorist attack that left fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters dead or wounded. An attack that rent the fabric of families across the Inland Empire. A valley nestled against hills on three sides. A place that can experience warm sunshine in the lowlands, while snow is piled deep enough for skiing up on the mountains. I know this to be true ‘cause in the mid-1980s we lived in Highland, a community on the hillside across from the area where the suspects lived and the shootings took place.

It is a place filled with many happy memories. My husband brought me fresh flowers almost every week ‘cause he passed a man selling flowers on the corner while driving home from work. We used to take our daughters to the drive-in movies pretty regularly with our van camper. I would cook hotdogs and make fresh popcorn using the stove, while serving cold sodas out of the little fridge. Sometimes our daughters would sit on the step of the van, eating watermelon, and spitting seeds into the gravel. And, how can I ever forget taking our girls and our Great Dane for ice cream at the local Dairy Queen, where the dog was a celebrity?

To know that this happy place now has a dark shadow of grief overlaying it, like the LA smog that creeps down the valley, is so sad. While I do not know any of the victims or their families, I feel a connection just by virtue of knowing their community ‘cause it was once my community. I think in some ways we are always a part of the places we have been, no matter how long ago. At least I know that is true for me. Perhaps it is due to my military upbringing and then my time as a military wife. For 40 years of my life I was always from somewhere, living somewhere, and going somewhere. A sort of past, present, AND future existence that made me feel connected to more places than one.

For this reason these families will be in my prayers this holiday season. I will pray that the Lord will comfort those who mourn and heal those who suffer. It is my Christmas wish that these families can find a little bit of happiness in the season, despite the darkness that has descended into their lives. Especially those families with children. A sad Christmas can become a forever blight on a holiday that should be filled with love and light. But, I know it must be a nearly impossible situation for those who lost loved ones. However, as many celebrate the season commemorating the birth of Jesus, who is known as both Comforter and Healer, I pray the burdens of woe are lightened for those in pain.

I also pray that America can awaken to the threat that now lives right within our midst. The threat our own government seems unwilling to acknowledge. The threat of acts of terror right here at home. An all too real threat. Just ask the citizens of San Bernardino, California if the threat exists!