By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, February 17, 2016
A few days ago, I was bumping along a tooth-rattlingly
rough stretch of interstate when I saw a sign: Rough Road. No kidding, Sparky. A mile or two of
shake-rattle-’n’-roll later, another sign: Rough
Road. You don’t say. Rocka-rocka-rocka-thumpa-thumpa-thump:
Rough Road. Sign after sign after
sign: Rough Road.
You know what they could have done with all the time and
energy and resources put into erecting those Rough Road signs? Maybe — here’s a crazy notion — put some new
blacktop on that sorry lunar hellscape that Uncle Stupid calls I-10. But that’s
government for you: “Not only do we refuse to do our job and maintain these
roads despite a $40 billion a year budget for doing just that, we’re going to
pay a gang of union-goon schmucks $40 an hour to erect signs advertising the
length and breadth of the shaft we are giving you.”
With that in mind: Hurray for Tim Cook.
Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple, and Uncle Stupid is leaning
on his company just at the moment, demanding that the firm create some
specialized iPhone code — call it “FBiOS” — that will allow it to crack the
mobile phone used by one of the San Bernardino terrorists. Which is to say,
with all of the power and money and other resources we put into national
security, law enforcement, and counterterrorism, the Men in Black cannot defeat
some yahoo’s iPhone PIN.
This is what happens when you apply the Rough Road–sign model to fighting the
war on terror. Yes, of course we’d like to have some prosecutions and
convictions in the San Bernardino case, inasmuch as it is clear that the
jihadists there did not act without some assistance. And, yes, there probably
is some useful information to be had from that iPhone. But there is something
deeply unseemly about a gigantic and gigantically powerful national-security
apparatus’s being stymied by ordinary consumer electronics and then putting a
gun to the head of Apple executives and demanding that they do Uncle Stupid’s
job for him.
You know what would be better than prosecuting those who
helped the San Bernardino jihadists? Stopping them, i.e., for the Men in Black
to do their goddamned jobs. An arranged marriage to a Pakistani woman who spent
years doing . . . something . . . in Saudi Arabia? Those two murderous misfits
had more red flags on them than Bernie Sanders’s front yard on May Day, and the
best minds in American law enforcement and intelligence did precisely squat to
stop their rampage. Having failed to do its job, the federal government now
seeks even more power — the power to compel Apple to write code rendering the
security measures in its products useless — as a reward for its failure.
There’s an argument that we shouldn’t judge our
counterterrorism efforts by their failures but by their successes — all the
attacks that have been prevented that we don’t know about. There is a little
something to that, but not very much. The Transportation Security
Administration, for example, has perpetrated a great deal of thievery and
contraband trafficking, but Der Gropenführer does not seem to have prevented a
single act of terrorism in all its history. We spend hundreds of billions of
dollars a year on intelligence, counterterrorism, and law enforcement. In some
cases, we have given these guys a license to kill American citizens. With that
kind of power and those kinds of resources, it is entirely appropriate that
they be judged by their failures, of which San Bernardino is a spectacular
example.
From the IRS to the ATF to the DEA to Hillary Rodham
Clinton’s super-secret toilet e-mail server, the federal government has shown,
time and again, that it cannot be trusted with any combination of power and
sensitive information. Its usual range of official motion traces an arc from
indifference through incompetence to malice.
Where the federal government imagines that it gets the
power to order a private firm to write software to do its incompetent minions’
jobs for them is anybody’s guess. Tim Cook and Apple are right to raise the
corporate middle finger to this nonsense. Cook says that the software the FBI
demands is “too dangerous to create” given the risk that it could fall into
“the wrong hands.”
Perhaps he is being polite, but the fact is that the FBI is the wrong hands. Its agents have
leaked secret information in live investigations to their girlfriends, engaged
in various and sundry episodes of extortion and blackmail, and used federal
resources to check up on their favorite strippers. (Nobody got fired, of
course. Nobody ever gets fired.) And of course, as in a great many federal
offices, FBI supervisors spend a great deal of time watching pornography on
their office computers and masturbating. That earned one supervisor a 35-day
suspension. Is that how they do it in your office?
The more you think about what the hell it is the federal
government actually does, the less important it seems. About 80 percent of its
activity, as measured by cash flows, consists of simply transferring money from
one group of Americans to others in the form of Social Security checks and
subsidized medical benefits. Its senior leaders steadfastly refuse to do their
jobs: The border goes unsecured, visa controls remain nonexistent in spite of a
specific legal requirement that the government address this problem, the roads
and other infrastructure under the federal umbrella of responsibility are a
mess in spite of the trillions of dollars thrown at them in recent years, etc.
And the federal government’s answer is: “Why won’t those mean meanies at Apple
do our jobs for us? So what if that means rendering many of their products
entirely worthless and betraying the trust of millions of customers?”
Maybe your experience is different. In my experience,
what government actually does at every level is hassle me and take my money
while failing to do the basic things that we constituted it to do. The borders
are a joke, the roads crumbling, the schools a sty of corruption and
miseducation, and the police, as a wise man once put it, are a janitorial
service that takes your body away after the deed has been done. Perhaps it is
appropriate that our next presidential election may very well pit a
reality-television grotesque against an antediluvian Red from Brooklyn.
American politics consists of an increasingly bitter and hate-fueled fight over
an increasingly irrelevant institution. If Apple disappeared tomorrow, the
world would notice. You can’t say the same about the TSA or the Small Business
Administration, and it is not entirely clear that you could say much better about
the FBI.
Rough Road?
Indeed, it promises to be.
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