In iPhone we trust?

"To do a great right, do a little wrong", William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

The Apple vs FBI dispute over the San Bernardino iPhone is a case with far reaching long-term consequences for all. No easy solution here. The balance between privacy and security is obviously is where people are focusing their attention. But while an important discussion, I don’t think this is what makes the case an extraordinarily complex one. We have solved this tension in so many ways in history. While for example we admit the access of banking records, we protect the privacy of the patient/doctor relationship or the lawyer/client privilege even for the most diehard criminals and terrorists. No. The case brings other issues. It exposes the tensions between the global technology companies and their internet ecosystems that hover different jurisdictions (democratic or not) and our judgment over the moral legitimacy of those same jurisdictions. We would not be having this discussion if every court of the world would be like an US Court, would we? This tension between global technology companies and different nation states and national public interest is manifesting itself in other disputes like taxes, just to cite one. And this is no different. It also touches individual corporate freedom. Apple thought it had protected itself from the pre-Snowden government interference by basically not creating a backdoor for its new IOS system. Can it be forced to create one? By just the US Legal System? Why not another Legal System? Believe me that this case will be a headline in history books many years from now. And whoever ends up judging this case will need the same extraodinary legal finesse that Portia showed in  saving Antonio's pound of flesh while respecting Venice legal precedent. A tall order indeed. 

Band of Brothers

"Extremism is so easy. You've got your position, and that's it. It doesn't take much thought. And when you go far enough to the right you meet the same idiots coming around from the left". Clint Eastwood

What unites such disparate figures as Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Marine Le Pen and Jeremy Corbyn is in fact a total disrespect for the workings of modern democracies for the past six decades. The need to compromise, negotiate and find common ground. It is the same discourse against the establishment, of the pure outsider that will come to clean the rubbish of centrist sell-out politics. No matter that these pure white knights are anything but. It just requires a complete suspension of disbelief to associate political revolution to Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn that have been living out of politics for the past 40 years. Or that Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump can in any dimension represent the common working class voter.

On the left, the heritage of modern social democracy represented by the centrist policies of Blair and Bill Clinton is being ripped apart mercilessly. And on the right, pure parochial nativism reigns untrammeled. And on the left and right, social media and cable TV just allows everybody to live on their perfect bubble of ideological purity. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once said that everybody has the right to its own opinion but not to his own facts. What he did not anticipate was that we would reach a time where facts would be a superfluous accessory to opinions. This is the brave new world of politics we seem to live in.