Dear FBI, NSA and all three-letter agencies: ‘We don’t trust you guys’

By David McElroy · September 25, 2014

Mr. James Comey
Director
Federal Bureau of Investigation
Washington, D.C.

Dear Mr. Comey:

It was with great interest that I read your comments to reporters on Thursday attacking Apple and Google for their recent moves to increase my privacy from your snooping eyes. According to news reports, you said, “I am a huge believer in the rule of law, but I am also a believer that no one in this country is beyond the law. What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to place themselves above the law.”

You are upset that Apple announced it will no longer unlock devices such as iPhones and iPads for government agencies. The company has taken steps to make sure it doesn’t even have the technical capability of complying with orders to unlock iOS devices, and a statement from Apple CEO Tim Cook was very direct about the company’s desire to protect the privacy of its users.

Google quickly followed suit and said it would start turning on encryption by default, too. You don’t seem to like this, Mr. Comey. And your spin was pretty interesting. You went for the oldest trick in the book. You said your concern was all about the children. That was hilarious. Here’s what you said, according to the reporters who were there:

“Google is marketing their Android the same way: Buy our phone and law-enforcement, even with legal process, can never get access to it. There will come a day — well it comes every day in this business — when it will matter a great, great deal to the lives of people of all kinds that we be able to with judicial authorization gain access to a kidnapper’s or a terrorist or a criminal’s device. I just want to make sure we have a good conversation in this country before that day comes. I’d hate to have people look at me and say, ‘Well how come you can’t save this kid,’ ‘how come you can’t do this thing.'”

That was a good one, Mr. Comey. I’ll bet your PR people were chortling as they came up with that. We used to use the same “for the children” lie when I worked in politics, so I have to say that I have professional admiration for the spin. It sells well to the suckers in the seats who still believe the things you’re selling.

But here’s the thing. I don’t trust you anymore. Seriously. I grew up thinking you and your buddies were the good guys. But you and the various other federal agencies — along with their friends in state and local agencies — have proven that I can’t trust you. Even if I still believed in a coercive state — a concept which I’m sure would confuse you, so we won’t talk about that — you guys do bad things. I don’t trust you. Lots and lots of my friends don’t trust you.

You lock people in cages for growing a plant. You attack homes and businesses because the people there conduct voluntary transactions with other people that you say they aren’t allowed to conduct. You steal money from people and call it “civil forfeiture,” even when you don’t even accuse them of a crime. You read our mail and listen to our telephone calls.

You see, I have a business relationship with Apple (and with Google to a lesser extent). They provide products to me that I have the choice of using or not using. And here’s the thing. You believe you have the right to force me to obey you. You believe you have the right to force everybody to obey you. You have always been happy to enforce your orders with guns.

You see, technology is slowly helping to make your guns less effective. If you hadn’t been so out of control and dictatorial over the years — not necessarily you personally, but you and the goons you work with enforcing unjust and immoral rules against us — we might trust you to have the power to look around at more stuff. I used to trust you. But you’ve abused and destroyed my trust. It’s completely gone.

Apple and Google have an incentive to keep me happy. I’m their customer and so are millions and millions of other people who also don’t trust you. Your guns are still pretty impressive, but you are slowly losing your power to force everyone to obey you. I realize this upsets you, because using force to get your way is all you know.

Sadly, the time is going to come when you can’t find a real criminal — a kidnapper or murderer or thief — because I’ve been forced to lock my devices to keep you out. When that day gets here, though, don’t blame me. Don’t blame Apple. Don’t blame Google.

When that day gets here, blame yourself. You and your fellow goons.

You guys are the reason we can’t trust anyone with our data. So when your theoretical child is kidnaped or dies, you go look in the mirror and realize that you’re the one responsible.

You’ve abused our trust and we’re going to do everything in our power to protect our information from you. If some criminals get to protect themselves, too, as a result, that’s unfortunate.

But you guys created this. Don’t blame anyone else.

Share on Social Networks

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

Related Posts