UBER FORCED TO DRIVE DEFENSIVELY, AGAIN, AFTER MASS SHOOTING

As authorities look for the reasons why a
Michigan man allegedly embarked on a mass
shooting spree over the weekend, the ridehailing
service Uber is addressing his record as a
driver with the company.
Critics say the episode could bring more
attention to concerns about the fastgrowing
service, which has been dogged by
controversy on the road to becoming one of
the most valuable privately funded companies
in the world.

Jason Dalton, the man arrested in connection
with the Kalamazoo rampage that left six
people dead, is a former insurance adjuster who
had been working as a driver for Uber’s ridehailing
service. Authorities were investigating
unconfirmed reports he may have picked up
passengers in the hours before and after the
rampage on Saturday.
San Francisco-based Uber has been one of the
most successful tech industry startups in recent
years, as millions of customers have flocked to
use its smartphone app for hailing rides in 380
cities around the globe. The company says its
drivers are independent contractors who use the
app to help find customers and schedule trips.
Private backers have poured more than $10
billion into the company, under terms that value
the business at more than $50 billion - making
it the biggest in a recent wave of tech firms that
have grown to enormous size without taking the
traditional step of selling stock to the public.
But since its launch in 2009, Uber has faced
criticism for a pricing formula that can send
rates skyrocketing at times of high demand,
and for side-stepping regulators and licensing
requirements in some cities where it’s opened
for business. And after several reported assaults
by drivers, critics have also complained the
company should do more to screen drivers and
guard passengers’ safety.
Some of that criticism has been raised by
competitors and regulators who argue that
Uber’s success has come as the company
has expanded while seeking to avoid the
strict licensing and permit requirements that
traditional tax companies face.

“I do think this is an outrageous incident that’s
going to draw more attention to this issue,” said
Dave Sutton, spokesman for “Who’s Driving You,”
an organization backed by Uber’s competitors
in the taxi and limousine industry, which has
fought the company’s expansion.
Authorities identified Dalton as a 45-year-old
from Kalamazoo Township who police said
had no criminal record. They said victims of
the shootings in and around the city of
Kalamazoo had no apparent connection to him
or to each other.
Uber spokeswoman Nairi Hourdajian confirmed
Dalton had driven for Uber. Hourdajian wouldn’t
say whether he was picking up fares for the ridesharing
service Saturday night.
Authorities, however, were investigating a
Facebook post which indicated the suspect
was driving erratically around the time of the
shootings and may have picked up at least
one Uber fare while authorities were looking
for him, according to Kalamazoo County
Prosecutor Jeff Getting.
Uber said Sunday that it has offered to assist
authorities in their investigation. In a statement,
Uber chief security officer Joe Sullivan said the
company is “horrified and heartbroken at the
senseless violence.”
While Uber says it screens drivers and conducts
background checks, critics say the ride-hailing
company uses private screening services that
don’t have access to as much information
as local police can obtain when they check
fingerprint records.

The company said earlier this month that it will
pay $28.5 million to settle two lawsuits that
alleged Uber misled customers about safety
procedures and fees. It’s also facing a separate
a lawsuit by district attorneys in San Francisco
and Los Angeles, who alleged that Uber’s checks
failed to prevent the company from hiring
several felons.
If Dalton had no criminal record, it’s not clear
that Uber would have had any reason to keep
him from driving. Uber, meanwhile, instituted
a policy last year that prohibits driver and
passengers from possessing firearms. Anyone
found to be in violation of the policy may be
prohibited from using or driving for the service.
While there have been several cases in which
Uber drivers have been charged with assaulting
passengers, there have also been incidents in
which the company’s drivers have been attacked
by passengers.
Uber has also faced complaints that one of
its executives in New York used information
collected by the Uber app to track a
passenger’s movements. The company has
since said that it has taken steps to protect
passenger’s privacy, including strict limits on
access to the identities of riders.

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APPLE TELLS EMPLOYEES WHY IT WON’T HELP HACK SHOOTER’S PHONE

Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook acknowledged to
employees this week that “it does not feel right”
to refuse to help the FBI hack a locked iPhone
used by a gunman in the San Bernardino
mass shootings. But he said that to do so
would threaten data security for millions and
“everyone’s civil liberties.”
“We have no tolerance or sympathy for
terrorists,” Cook wrote in an early morning
email addressed to the Apple “Team.” ‘’When
they commit unspeakable acts like the tragic
attacks in San Bernardino, we work to help the
authorities pursue justice for the victims.”

But he reiterated the company’s position that to
hack the San Bernardino gunman’s phone would
ultimately risk “security of hundreds of millions
of law-abiding people.”
Cook’s email came just hours after FBI director
James Comey said in an online post that
Apple owes it to the San Bernardino victims to
cooperate and said the dispute wasn’t about
creating legal precedent.
The FBI “can’t look the survivors in the eye, or
ourselves in the mirror, if we don’t follow this
lead,” Comey said.
The iPhone used by Syed Farook, who along
with his wife killed 14 people in the Dec. 2
rampage, was locked. At the government’s
request, a Federal magistrate judge has ordered
Apple to help the FBI hack into the passwordprotected
phone.

The case has sparked nationwide debate over
digital privacy and national security. Apple, in its
message to employees, appeared to be sensitive
to criticism that the company is simply trying to
protect its proprietary business.
“Apple is a uniquely American company,”
Cook wrote. “It does not feel right to be on
the opposite side of the government in a case
centering on the freedoms and liberties that
government is meant to protect.” But he said,
“this case is about much more than a single
phone or a single investigation, so when we
received the government’s order we knew we
had to speak out.”
Comey, in a statement posted on the Lawfare
blog, sought to defend the FBI demand for
access to the iPhone as well as counter Apple’s
arguments that the request risks threatening
the digital privacy of Apple customers all over
the world.

“We simply want the chance, with a search
warrant, to try to guess the terrorist’s passcode
without the phone essentially self-destructing
and without it taking a decade to guess
correctly. That’s it,” Comey wrote in a fourparagraph
statement. “We don’t want to break
anyone’s encryption or set a master key loose on
the land.”
Cook’s message to employees had “Thank you
for your support,” in the subject line. He told
employees that the company believes abiding
by the judge’s order would set a dangerous
precedent that would essentially create a
backdoor to the encrypted iPhone. That would
set “a dangerous precedent that threatens
everyone’s civil liberties,” he said.
An accompanying question-and-answer posting
for customers acknowledges that while it is
technically possible for Apple to do what the
judge ordered, that it’s “something we believe is
too dangerous to do.”
Apple also points to the difficulty of keeping
such a “master key” safe once it has been
created. The government has said that Apple
could keep the specialized technology it
would create to help officials hack the phone -
bypassing a security time delay and feature that
erases all data after 10 consecutive, unsuccessful
attempts to guess the unlocking passcode. This
would allow the FBI to use technology to rapidly
and repeatedly test numbers.
Cook said that if the company’s engineers
were to do as ordered, Apple would do its
best to protect the technology, but that the
company “would be relentlessly attacked by
hackers and cybercriminals.”

“The only way to guarantee such a powerful
tool isn’t abused and doesn’t fall into the wrong
hands is to never create it,” Apple said. The
company has until Friday to formally protest the
ruling in court.
The case would not have existed if the county
government that owned the iPhone had
installed a feature on it that would have allowed
the FBI to easily and immediately unlock the
phone. San Bernardino County had bought
the technology, known as mobile device
management from MobileIron Inc., but never
installed it on any of the inspectors’ phones,
including Farook’s, said county spokesman
David Wert said.
There is no countywide policy on the matter and
departments make their own decisions, he said.
The service costs $4 per month per phone.

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SAN BERNARDINO SHOOTING SPARKS MAJOR PRIVACY BATTLE

Apple at Loggerheads with FBI

WHY PRIVACY IS THE MOST IMPORTANT
ISSUE OF OUR TIME
Many of us may now be used to the new age
of intense privacy debates in the wake of the
Edward Snowden fiasco, but it seems that
this intensity has just stepped up yet another
notch with the tussle that has broken out
in recent days between Apple and the FBI.
Whichever side of the debate you are on - if
you take a definite stance at all - the latest
debate surrounding our attitudes to encrypted
technology in the wake of the San Bernardino
shooting has implications for us all.
It is a debate that has its roots in the most
terrible tragedy, of the deaths of 14 people
and serious injuries to a further 22 in a terrorist
attack at the Inland Regional Centre in the
Californian city of San Bernardino on December
2 last year. The perpetrators of the latest mass
shooting to shock America were a married
Redlands couple - Syed Rizwan Farook and
Tashfeen Malik - who were later killed by police
in a shootout.
This is where the difficulty truly begins for
Apple - Farook owned an iPhone 5c that
authorities want to unlock as they continue
their urgent investigations into the appalling
events at a training event at the San
Bernardino County Department of Public
Health. The FBI turned to Apple for help to
access the device’s data - only to be rebuffed
in the kind of spectacularly public manner that
has prompted frenzied debate across America.

COOK MAKES HIS STAND
In an open letter to Apple customers that was
published on February 16 and can still be
viewed online, Apple CEO Tim Cook outlined
his version of events of what the United States
government had asked his company to do -
“build a backdoor to the iPhone”.
He added that the FBI had requested that Apple
“make a new version of the iPhone operating
system, circumventing several important
security features, and install it on an iPhone
recovered during the investigation. In the wrong
hands, this software - which does not exist today
- would have the potential to unlock any iPhone
in someone’s physical possession.”
Cook also criticised the FBI’s “unprecedented”
attempted use of the All Writs Act of 1789 to
justify expanding its authority and effectively
force Apple to remove security features and
make it easier for an iPhone to be unlocked by
“brute force”. He continued: “The implications
of the government’s demands are chilling...
ultimately, we fear that this demand would
undermine the very freedoms and liberty our
government is meant to protect.”

STRONG OPINIONS ON BOTH SIDES
OF THE DEBATE
As one might imagine, those taking either or
even no stance to Apple’s approach had strong
words to add to the ensuing public discussion.
A highly understandable critic of the
Cupertino firm’s stand against a federal
judge’s order was Ryan Reyes, the boyfriend
of one of the 14 victims, Daniel Kaufman.
Describing himself as “extremely pissed-off”
over an announcement that had also caused
him to reconsider his ownership of Apple
products, he opined: “It’s infuriating to me,
because I feel like all companies - especially
US companies - should do what they have to
do to protect our country”.
Republican presidential frontrunner Donald
Trump was another to weigh in against
Apple, declaring: “I agree 100% with the
courts... who do they think they are? They
have to open it up.” However, Cook also found
plenty of support, including from transgender
woman and activist Evan Greer, who said she
had seen “the deeply chilling effect of overly
broad government surveillance”, adding in
reference to her now 5-year old son: “What type
of world is he going to grow up in? Will it be
one in which he’s constantly being monitored
... where he feels that he has no privacy?”
Cook also received plenty of backing
from the tech community, Silicon Valley
entrepreneur Alex Lindsay even stating: “Any
communications/tech CEO that isn’t standing
with Apple against the FBI is basically admitting
that they’ve already been compromised.”

THE IMPORTANCE OF GOOGLE’S ROLE
Sure enough, even Google - the developer of
the open-source Android software - voiced
its qualified support, CEO Sundar Pichai
tweeting: “We [Google] build secure products
to keep your information safe and we give law
enforcement access to data based on valid
legal orders, but that’s wholly different than
requiring companies to enable hacking of
customer services and data.”
Pichai added that the case could set “a
troubling precedent”, but - as if to emphasise
a rather softer attitude than Apple’s to such a
critical issue - concluded that he was “looking
forward to a thoughtful and open discussion”
on the matter.
Indeed, this case represents a potential public
banana skin for Google, given its famously lax
attitude to security compared to Apple - the
search giant’s entire business model, after
all, is based on the collection of data from its
users. Furthermore, Android is not only open
source, but also much more fragmented and
less tightly controlled than iOS, with only 1.3%
of Android devices even running the most
recent, Marshmallow version of the software.
It may also be noted that Pichai only made his
public intervention after calls for him to do
so by the likes of WhiteHat Security founder
Jeremiah Grossman and Snowden, who
surmised that “this is the most important tech
case in a decade. Silence means Google picked
a side, but it’s not the public’s.”
Quite frankly, we would struggle to disagree
with Snowden’s take on this crucial matter. In
today’s age where it is becoming increasingly
apparent that privacy is under greater threat
than ever before, Google’s slack attitude
would seem to represent a trap for users, who
are coming to view companies that know
absolutely everything about them with evergreater
suspicion.
WHAT COULD - AND IS LIKELY TO -
HAPPEN NEXT
Whatever way this hugely controversial and
momentous case ultimately plays out, there’s
no question of where the wider public stands.
In a 9to5Mac poll entitled “Should Apple
break into the San Bernardino iPhone?”,
16,594 or almost 85% of respondents
expressed the view that it should not do so.
11.37% - more than 2,000 votes at the time this
article was being written - were in favour of
Apple complying with the FBI, while 2.69%, or
just over 500 people said they were indifferent.
No less interesting was an accompanying
poll on the site that asked the question, “How
important is privacy to you?”, to which a
whopping 70.91% of people responded that
“Privacy is one of the most important features
for me”, and more than a quarter said that while
they cared more about other features, privacy
was nonetheless important to them. That left
a mere 1.49% of respondents who described
themselves as indifferent about privacy in
general, and 1.2% who felt privacy didn’t affect
them at all.
With petitions having been started to urge
the White House to relent in its efforts to
make device makers create a “backdoor” for
the government to access citizens’ data, even
while the Senate Intelligence Committee
Chairman Richard Burr reportedly plans a
new bill that would criminally penalize firms
failing to comply with such orders, it’s clear
that this issue will run and run and run.
Our own stance is a very strong one - that
this case is quite simply one of the most
important of our generation, and that Apple
must be supported in spearheading this battle
to protect your privacy rights. For as long as
we all believe in the personal privacy of all
good and ordinary citizens, even as we stand
resolutely against terrorists, this is a battle
that simply has to be won.

by Benjamin Kerry & Gavin Lenaghan


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