For the last few weeks there has been an ongoing story in the media about this iPhone that was the property of a mass shooter in San Bernadino County, California. The FBI doesn't have the password, and Apple doesn't have a straight forward way to give it to them. The phone is owned by the shooter's boss, the County of San Bernadino. They want the FBI to have access, so there isn't any roadblock there. Since they didn't get cooperation by asking nicely, the FBI got a court order. So now Apple is facing a deadline this coming Friday, when the wrath of the law will descend on them if they don't uncork some magic to get around that pesky password problem. From my radio I heard that there would be a vigil outside the Apple Store in Palo Alto. I showed up to add my support to the event.

From half a block away it just looked like a couple of dozen people not moving too fast on the sidewalk. There wasn't any of the noisy chanting you see at union protests. As I got closer I realized that some of them were brandishing iPhones and iPads.

        

Maybe half a dozen of those present were reporters of one kind or another. There was a TV news crew I didn't take a picture of.

     

The fine print reads "YOU MAY BE ORDERED TO DESTROY IT TO". The idea is that old thing "good fences make good neighbors". That password was enough to force the world to respect the phone's owner's rights. How do we keep the bullies from forcing their wills on us without the good encryption it was part of?

     

Under progress the fine print is "CAN THE GOVERNMENT FORBID PRIME NUMBERS?" I wish I'd asked why that guy sees a connection between prime numbers and progress. Bound to be a story there.

Over machine breaking the fine print is "CAN'T OUTSMART IT? OUTLAW IT!" That's a summary of the bullies SOP.

        

There must be an app or a website or something with a lot of signs to download and put on your iPhone/iPad for the event. I saw the woman in blue scrolling through them before she picked this one. Didn't get to see the ones that nobody showed me.

  

The newspaper a few days before heavily colored my thinking. It was one of those "everything's connected to everything else" kind of moments. A perfect storm of privacy stories colluded to give me that "reading the news only makes it worse" feelings. It wasn't just the Apple story, despite the fact that was the main news. There was also a woman with 33 IDs. The bottom line was a "nobody here but us chickens" political story. And then there was a row of private advertisers I cut out of the preview. Click on Cook to find out more.

     

People were talking about the fine points of privacy policy. What I got from it was that once your phone has things like your bank account numbers on it, any thief that can get into it can drain your money away with just a few keystrokes. And then there are things like those pictures you don't want the world to see of your significant other at home.... Good password protection is a valuable tool in minimizing that kind of problem.

This sign captured the essence of what I'd learned back in my video game days. Anything worth protecting will have lots of kids/enemies/etc. looking for a way to get past the barrier. The safest way to protect the doorway is to not have another doorway they won't need your key for.