Apple

If Edward Snowden says something is even worse than it looks one should look at it twice. The tweet which said this refered directly to a New York Times article from February 25 with the headline "Obama Administration Set to Expand Sharing of Data That N.S.A. Intercepts." This initiative by the President during his last few months in office is the edge of a concerted effort to expand surveillance of the global public that is being mounted by every stakeholder group within the beltway.

FBI director James Comey has been amplifying his efforts to gain a winning edge in his public battle to force Apple to write specialized software for cracking iPhones. Although most of the tech industry has publicly lined up aside Apple, Comey found a friend in Bill Gates and a lackey at the Pew Foundation to try and spin the conversation. The conversation about an effective right to privacy is one that Comey has been planning for years ahead of action that the White House has been planning to take.

There is a hidden problem in warfare when it comes to information. You can actually have too much of it. It is an extension of the “can't see the forest thru the trees.” cliché. Having too much information can lead one to overlook which bit of information is important, or when a bit becomes important. That happened to Edward Snowden last night on twitter, literally right in front of me, and I could do nothing but hit [prt sc] and ponder the gravity of it.

Sometimes I have difficulty writing headlines that don't reference livestock excrement so directly as to invalidate a story. That difficulty increases when it involves any statement made by the head of a police or espionage agency. Spies are liars. This is what they are paid for. Deception is the center of the profession of espionage and the FBI is a spy agency that occasionally dabbles in law enforcement.