Jim Patterson: Privacy, Security & Cyberspace

Commentary: Privacy, security and cyberspace

Posted by Steve Lee, Editor Online Only, Top Highlights, Around the Nation, Commentary Saturday, March 5th, 2016

Commentary

BY JIM PATTERSON

Apple CEO Tim Cook’s continued resistance to a federal court to allow the government access to information on the iPhone of dead ISIS inspired killer Syed Farook has produced a predictable cacophony of opinion. Farook and wife Tashfeen Malik, parents of a newborn, methodically murdered 14 colleagues in San Bernardino, Calif., in December.

Leading GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump called on consumers to boycott Apple. California’s senior U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein called on Cook to cooperate with federal authorities to determine if the iPhone contains information on other ISIS terrorists and other possible terror attacks.
Cook maintains the killers, both dead, have a right to privacy on the iPhone. It is an argument, like the iPhone, designed to change the ways society and government view technology, privacy and security.

It is an argument that will also cause discussion on the philosophy and management of a prominent and an out-of-the-closet and openly gay CEO. If being openly gay and out-of-the closet is liberating and productive for corporate managers and other professionals across the nation’s business sector, why should Mr. Cook take a position to hide information held by killers from the legitimate concerns of government investigators?

Sexuality as well as security are at the heart of the question. Consumers justifiably use iPhones to manage personal business, legal and questionable, and relationships, gay and straight. If Cook cooperates with government investigators, it could open electronic doors and closets not just to security issues but to relationship issues people would like to keep private.

Privacy, as former National Security Agency contractor and exiled fugitive Edward Snowden demonstrated, is largely an illusion with government agents using wireless networks to illegally listen to conversations and monitor activity of U.S. citizens and allied foreign officials and international businesspeople.  If hackers can access U.S. government communications at the White House, and State and Defense Departments, are we to seriously believe a person’s Apple iPhone is immune from cyber surveillance by Apple employees, government officials, Chinese hackers, or tabloid reporters?
We would all like to think our private information is indeed private. Similarly, we would like to think government agents, like IRS agents, would not target private citizens for their political beliefs but President Obama fooled the nation by going after Tea Party political critics. Tim Cook, Apple shareholders and iPhone owners have similar concerns about the administration’s reach into the privacy of their device.

Despite talk about freedom and a Constitutional Right to Privacy, people have concerns. We have too many examples of government agents intent on punishing former lovers, bosses and political critics by causing legal and bureaucratic nightmares that result in personal bankruptcy, broken relationships and suicides.

In the 1960s a number of international sexual scandals at the United Nations, Westminster and Washington had columnists writing about sin and statecraft. Fast forward to 2016 and the issues are sin, security and cyberspace.

Issues of diplomacy and behavior were difficult to reconcile 60 years ago. They are more complex in the world Steve Jobs and Tim Cook have given us.

Longtime Washington diplomat Jim Patterson writes from Washington and Silicon Valley. JEPCapitolHill@gmail.com
(c) LGBT Weekly, San Diego.