Let's talk to the people who were in the bombings in Brussels about privacy and security and Apple, whose business is, primarily, selling apps to appholes and accessories for a hand held computer we are now addicted to. Apple and their devotees are passionate about privacy, but it seems they are always sending naked photos of themselves up to iCloud, as if will never rain. As it turns out, it pours.
Just like the pricey American Girl doll that became a money making machine churning out clothes and accessories that parents could not buy unless they had a certificate that proved they had bought at least one doll, Apple geniuses have lured us on to a merry-go-round that keeps spinning with no way to shut if off. They have not invented a way to shut it off, you see. One of my friends, who happens to be a physicist, explained to me that when you delete messages they don't actually really delete. When you send a message into the universe and bounce it off a satellite, that message does bounce to another place. But the universe is vast and space takes up most of the space, and so to get rid of something you have sent into space is complicated.
For the Apple corporation to paint themselves as an entity with lofty moral standards is absurd. They allow Google to spy on me and keep a data base on every product I consider buying on the internet. They themselves sell a product they know is as alluring as heroin and nicotine and has become an obsession among young people, especially. On iPhone you can hook up with hundreds of your imaginary friends on Facebook and feel like you're a social butterfly. You can check your email, or gmail. But how many friends in life can we really handle? I find it hard to see all of my real friends. I long to be with my family, mostly, and with people I have known since before Facebook was invented. We remember what it was like to make a phone call in a phone booth and speak privately.
How many appholes who are crowing about privacy speak on their phones in public, spewing out their personal lives to anyone within a twenty-foot radius or more? There is nothing private about a cell phone conversation these days.
I sat next to a man on a plane yesterday that did nothing but look at his cell phone for the entire flight. Across the aisle his wife looked at hers' and next to her their son, who had on headphones, looked at his. I happened to follow this family down the escalator to baggage claim and the wife and husband continued to look at their cell phones and the son remained on his headphones. Maybe this is the family values so called conservatives are pining for, but not me.
Every month Apple rolls out some new technology, like drip morphine, and addicts rush to the Apple store to get their fix. Apple changes the design of our expensive toy every year so we have to by new expensive toys and new chargers and accessories lest we cannot use them, and the prices keep going up. The newest Apple iPhone I bought last year is a piece crap, actually. The battery dies overnight. Siri often answers the questions I ask it with the wrong answer, and I find myself insulting her, because you see my personal assistant, Siri, is a woman with a smart mouth.
Apple is a one-way street to another new Apple iPhone and that's their mission. Their refusal to help open up a phone is no different than a citizen who is under suspicion refusing to open their door. With a warrant, authorities can search your house, and since iPhones now house our lives, a search warrant ought to suffice. What corporation has the right to build a house that nobody can get into, ever, under any circumstance?
When a house is burning, firemen don't have to ask permission to put out the fire. Our privacy is not under siege. We have given that up already with the invention of the cellular phone, Facebook, google, IMDB, and fact checks on line that can be had by anybody who wants to know all about you.
Currently we are under attack, at least now and then, by a worldwide radical organization that wants women to wear dark sheets over their bodies and hoods over their faces. These are devout fascists who pretty much aspire to a world in which women step in line and make babies and do what they are told and where gay people shut up and stop being gay. I'm not on the side of fascists like Ted Cruz or Donald Trump, who singles out people as criminal by their ethnicity. I was never on the side of the fascist takeovers of Chile and Argentina by juntas America supported and even conspired with. But I am on the side of recognition that there is an organization called ISIS that is an extremely dangerous and we need to track them with what means we have.
Apple is selling iPhones to terrorists. They don't discriminate, nor do they have the technology to discriminate. Maybe they do and haven't told us yet. But we ought to be able to look inside the phones Apple sells to terrorist, especially the one who was shot after a murderous attack in San Bernardino. There is almost more inside our iPhones that is about our lives than what is in our actual homes. When need be, we have to be able to collect that evidence, with a warrant, and use it to our advantage.
Apple, stop being such an apphole.