Blog Directory For my Peers

This post concerns my blog directory in the production phase.

Below is a working script for my video essay. Enjoy!

On December 2, 2015, two terrorists shot 36 people in San Bernardino, California. 21 were injured, 14 were killed. The event itself took place at the Inland Regional Center at a holiday gathering. 

The Inland Regional Center is ran by the government, and harbors 30,000+ with developmental disabilities to allow them to assimilate into society. 

Indeed this place was, indeed a gun-free zone. However, we aren't talking about gun control. Everybody has their opinions on guns, and let's face it, how many times can you beat a dead horse?

Let's talk about something much bigger than gun control - and that is your right to privacy, and the people who seek to violate it.

I purposefully will not include the names of the two terrorists, because that would only give them the attention they seek.

A lot happened on the day of the massacre. They dropped their child off before committing the shooting in the morning. The couple then drove to the Inland Regional Center, and then, opened fire on the crowd. Calls came in around 11:00AM saying people had been shot.

Around 7 minutes later, firefighters made their way onto the scene. At 11:40AM, around police zoned off the area, and at 12:25PM, the officers then started sweeping the area.

Surveillance from various street cameras, eyewitnesses, etc. helped pinpoint a working timeline that allowed the police and FBI to track the suspect's movement.

18 minutes, from 12:59PM to 1:17PM, went undocumented. The movement of the two went dark, and that is precisely what worries the FBI. What were they doing during that time?

Perhaps knowing what the couple was doing during that short time could lead to so many other things. Perhaps they stopped at a house, where other terrorists reside as well. Maybe they could use this to find the weak link in the terrorists' network.

Unfortunately, this is speculation at its finest, completely unsubstantiated in factual basis.

But what is not speculation is that what the FBI wants to do will harm the average user's rights and only benefit direct people resulted by the tragedy emotionally.

The FBI demanded in February that Apple create a backdoor, which allows them to punch as many passcodes into the phone without wiping the hard-drive after 10 incorrect attempts. 

This would allow them to crack into any phone, despite the fact they only seek data from these two phones.

Here are FIVE reasons that allowing an FBI backdoor on every iPhone is a terrible idea.

REASON 1: There is no single use key like the FBI wants. Access to one iPhone means access to every iPhone. As reasonable as it seems to make a one-use, the algorithms in which the iPhone encrypts data is standard across every phone. Once you have access to one, you have access to them all. 

REASON 2: It would hardly provide emotional support to grieving family members. The cynical approach to this is that their loved ones are already gone; it is selfish to jeopardize the lives of millions of law-abiding Americans in the name of "closure".

REASON 3: If FBI backdoor reaches their hands into Apple's phones, then it is a powerful statement to Google, Microsoft, and other leading tech companies that they are next. No one is safe because then the government has consent to go digging wherever they want.

REASON 4: Cyberterrorism is a much more prevalent threat than the random act of domestic violence. There is no concrete evidence that this was a foreign-inspired terror attack. In short, other countries that we are not on good terms with (North Korea, for example) would abuse these security shortcomings, thus threatening each individual who uses an iPhone in the United States, IN ADDITION TO 30 people in California.

Reason 5: Identifying these 18 minutes that went undocumented would not compensate for the fact that the suspects evaded the scene. There were other ways that the issue could have been resolved that don't involve such a drastic proposition, perhaps swifter police response times? When seconds mattered, the police show up way too late, which points that maybe staffing the police department with a few workers would be a more viable solution.

Even in theory, the thought that we should allow government officials to view private terrorist conversations automatically means that they would see our conversations too. It's a terrible idea, and put into practice, when would we be able to say "enough is enough, you can't see anymore"? This isn't about finding where terrorists ran around in California for 18 minutes, it's about protecting the liberties of the law-abiding citizen, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.