I personally find it hard to believe RIM’s assertions that the encryption on the data stored by their Blackberry servers can only be cracked by the user. The spiel given to the media today sounded painfully precise and specious.
India, China, Saudi Arabia, and several other nations have announced that they want RIM to give them access to software that will allow them to read users’ messages and data. For a week or so, it seemed like it was something RIM could do, but didn’t want to. Then they announced that, no, they couldn’t do it. Only the user could unencrypt his own data.
Hmmm. Hmmmmmm.
Silent through all this was the U.S. Government, which, thanks to the Patriot Act, can now lock you up without a warrant, send you to Jordan or Syria to be tortured, then imprison you in Guantanamo for five years, with no consequences whatsoever (thanks, Obama, for tricking us into believing you really thought this was unconstitutional or an affront to human rights in some way). Does RIM want me to believe that the U.S. government was content to be told that they would not be allowed to look at anyone’s data? Tough luck, Mr. Cheney– that is a user’s private information. You have no constitutional authority to look at it without permission.
I believe Obama probably doesn’t really like the Patriot Act. I’ll bet he also really thought he was going to change things. I believe that he doesn’t quite have the guts we thought he had when he was running for president. The American military and intelligence establishment, I figure, confronted him with their juiced-up scenarios of what could happen if one of these guys that they just know is a terrorist were able to blow up a subway station or the Statue of Liberty or something, and I’m sure the Republicans made sure he knew that they would be all over Fox News blaming him– and liberals in general– for the heart-rending deaths of innocent, lovable, happy, employed American citizens.
The essential dynamic here is this: if the intelligence agency really had enough accurate information to justly convict a person of a terrorism-related offense, they could easily do so legally any time they wanted. In fact, American juries fall all over themselves to convict anybody– especially colored or foreign people– of any offense imaginable, given the opportunity to do so, upon even the flimsiest evidence (and even, as recently reported, when the suspect has been exonerated by DNA evidence!).
The Patriot Act only exists so that the government can circumvent the normal, rational requirements of the constitution and lock somebody up just because they just know, in some intangible, irrational, unprovable, way, that the varmint was up to no good.