Laissez-faire vs. fascist

Laissez faire, telle devrait être la devise de toute puissance publique, depuis que le monde est civilisé … Détestable principe que celui de ne vouloir grandir que par l’abaissement de nos voisins! Il n’y a que la méchanceté et la malignité du coeur de satisfaites dans ce principe, et l’intérêt y est opposé. Laissez faire, morbleu! Laissez faire!![4]

(Trans: “Let it be, that should be the motto of all public powers, since the world was civilized … That we cannot grow except by lowering our neighbors is a detestable notion! Only malice and malignity of heart is satisfied with such a principle and our (national) interest is opposed to it. Let it be, for heaven’s sake! Let it be!)

wikipedia.org: Laissez-faire

There is news recently about how the FBI has obtained a court order to force Apple Inc. to provide them with a custom firmware for the iPhone 5s which does not contain built-in protections against password cracking.

Today it is in the news that Donald Trump is criticizing Apple over its decision to fight this court order.

What is going on here is that the government is trying to force Apple to essentially give a master key to the FBI which will be possible to use on millions of devices, not just the one in question. That is wrong. The government is trying to force Apple to deliberately severely cripple one of its products.

I don’t understand what is in the mind of Donald Trump on this. I thought the Republican party was supposed to represent laissez-faire market values, not fascism. It seems like a Democrat thing to try to force Apple to deliberately break its products so that the FBI can attempt to break in to a phone of someone who is already dead.

Yeah, that’s another thing. As someone mentioned in another forum, the people who committed the crimes are already dead. Now they are thrashing the corpses. It seems like their real motive in doing so is not for justice but as a convenient tool for a power grab.

By the way, if you follow this line of action on the government’s part to its full conclusion, it reaches a point of complete absurdity. It goes like this:

Company makes a phone which provides encryption security.
Government tries to force company to deliberately weaken or destroy the encryption feature.
Company makes new products which it is impossible to even be able to weaken the encryption.
Government makes that illegal.

Now we are into black market territory or territory where people find some ways to mod their devices.

What the government does next could be a couple of things: They could forbid any phone carrier to allow a black market device to be activated on their networks. Or, going a step further, they could force all phone manufacturers and carriers to only create and allow activation of whitelisted devices.

And if it reached that point, you’d have to ask what the fuck is the government doing? Is this what government is supposed to do? Is this what people expect their government to do?

No rational human would think so. Its absurd. But that is the logical endpoint of where this cat-and-mouse game goes.

The basic bottom line is that one person has the right to create and give a device to another person and the government has no business whatsoever getting involved in it. What the government is saying is “We have a right to know X, because it exists. Furthermore, if device A contains X, we have a right to force the manufacturer of A to alter A to enable us to access X. Because X exists.”

That kind of logic is purely grotesque and sick, and represents an utter disregard for some of the most basic, universally accepted human rights. It is an abject disregard for basic freedoms which our government should be upholding, not destroying.

So, fuck you to the government and fuck you to Donald Trump and other politicians for thinking and acting like fucking fascists. Your job is to uphold freedom, not destroy it.