I was in Chicago – arguably the homeland of mafia violence – when I read Bill Gates’ question: “What if we had never had wiretapping?”
Though this was only one of many topics Gates covered in the fourth installment of his “Ask Me Anything” chat on Reddit on March 8th, it struck a particular chord. He was talking about Apple’s now burgeoning-on-infamous fight to prevent the Fed – and more specifically, U.S. Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym – from forcing Apple to help catch domestic terrorists. Kinda like phone companies of the 20th century once used wiretapping to help the FBI take down the Mob.
The use of wiretaps in criminal investigations is far from new. Congress specifically authorized this practice back in 1934. But according to the ABA, government investigators and prosecutors have traditionally only done so to investigate “drug trafficking, mob-related offenses like racketeering, and other so-called ‘blue-collar crimes.’ Eighty-six percent of the more than 2,000 federal wiretaps that were authorized between 1999 and 2009 were for crimes related to illegal drugs.”
The leading justification for limiting wiretaps to those offenses? Their danger to the general public. Just like, say, a married couple in San Bernardino who use their phones to murder 14 people.
Pym supposedly started the fight by ordering Apple to unlock the iPhone 5C of Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the shooters. But this fight isn’t new, either; it’s been brewing since the heyday of small-time gangsters like Roy Olmstead, a former-cop-turned-moonshiner, who ran his bootlegging business out of Seattle (and whom we successfully locked up because of evidence gained from wiretapping his phone.)
According to news reports, however, “Apple has now warned… that forcing a company to devise a ‘back door’ to the very security protections it has developed to keep private information private would ‘undermine the basic security and privacy interests of hundreds of millions of individuals around the globe.’”
But Apple’s wrong. This kind of slippery-slope argument has already been debunked.
Courts have already held that the government can’t tap into your phone simply as “subterfuge” – that is, to search for evidence of other crimes. They can only do so if you’re committing this crime. Namely, trying to hurt a lot of innocent people. Plus, wiretapping has to be a last resort. The government must show that it’s tried other things to catch these kinds of terrorists, and how those methods have all failed. Finally, there must – duh! – be probable cause. So if you really think the Fed cares enough about your sketchy selfies from Vegas to tap into your phone (unless you’re planning on blowing up the Wynn Hotel, of course), I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
In the 1930s and again in the 1960s, the country was slowly being overrun by mobsters – arguably our first domestic terrorists. Organized crime syndicates made their living off of violently killing anyone who got in their way.
What stopped them? Wiretapping. It was necessary then, and it’s still necessary now… unless we’re all cool with a new generation of Al Capone’s using technology to hide their crimes and our corporate entities helping them to do it.
Pick your poison, America. Are we all going to band together to help Apple… or is Apple going to swallow its pride to help us all?
We'll have to wait until the Fed's April 5th status report to find out.
