FBI, Apple clash before Congress as encryption fight simmers
FBI, Apple clash before Congress as encryption fight simmers
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. government calls it a “vicious guard dog” that hurts national security. Apple says it’s critical to protecting consumer privacy against increasingly sophisticated hackers.
As the debate over built-in iPhone encryption has deadlocked in the courts, law enforcement and the world’s second-largest cellphone maker agreed on one point Tuesday: It’s now up to Congress to set boundaries in a long-simmering fight over who can legally access your digital life.
“There’s already a door on that iPhone. We’re asking Apple to take the vicious guard dog away and let us pick the lock,” FBI Director James Comey told a House judiciary panel on encryption Tuesday.
“The FBI is asking Apple to weaken the security of our products,” Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell countered later that afternoon.
Tuesday’s hearing shifted attention from the courts — where judges in the last month have issued significant but conflicting opinions — to Congress, where both sides say the policy debate belongs.
Osama bin Laden worried wife had tracking device in filling
WASHINGTON (AP) — Hiding in Pakistan, an increasingly paranoid Osama bin Laden suspected Iran of implanting a tracking device in his wife’s mouth and drafted a will directing much of his $29 million fortune to be spent on jihad after his death.
The details about the al-Qaida leader’s life were released Tuesday in a second batch of letters and other documents seized in a May 2011 raid that killed bin Laden at his secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
The letters detail his rift with militants who later broke off from al-Qaida and formed the Islamic State, as well as plans for a media blitz to mark the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Other correspondence resonates with suspicion and fear.
In a letter to one of his wives who lived in Iran, bin Laden expressed worry that her dental appointment could have allowed Iranians to implant a tracking device under her skin.
“My dear wife,” he began. “I was told that you went to a dentist in Iran, and you were concerned about a filling she put in for you. Please let me know in detail … any suspicions that any of the brothers may have about chips planted in any way.”
GOP leaders: No place for bigotry in the Republican Party
WASHINGTON (AP) — The two top Republican leaders in Congress denounced Donald Trump on Tuesday for his slow-moving disavowal of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blasted Trump’s “seeming ambivalence about David Duke and the KKK” as Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., warned that anyone who wants the Republican presidential nomination must reject racism.
The rebuke of Trump came as GOP voters went to the polls in 11 states in a “Super Tuesday” of balloting that many Republicans fear could give the combative and controversial New Yorker unstoppable momentum toward claiming the GOP presidential nod.
“This party does not prey on people’s prejudices. We appeal to their highest ideals. This is the Party of Lincoln,” Ryan told reporters.
At the same time, Ryan reiterated that he will support the eventual GOP presidential nominee.
Obama, congressional leaders talk Supreme Court vacancy
WASHINGTON (AP) — After an Oval Office sit-down on Tuesday did nothing to move Republican Senate leaders off their hard line against a Supreme Court nomination, Democrats pulled out another weapon in the heated election-year fight: Donald Trump.
In a White House meeting that lasted less than an hour, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told President Barack Obama that any confirmation process during a presidential campaign would politicize the court. They offered up no potential candidates that would win their backing and no route to filling the seat.
“This vacancy will not be filled this year,” McConnell told reporters after the meeting.
Democrats accused Republicans of trying to hold the seat open so that a Republican president can fill it. That president could be Trump, they noted, hoping to needle a GOP establishment uncomfortable with the prospects of Trump presidency.
The meeting — which also included Vice President Joe Biden, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the ranking Democrat on the judiciary committee — was the first time the leaders have met since Justice Antonin Scalia’s death last month set off a high-stakes clash over the Supreme Court vacancy.
Chicago homicides, shootings double over same period in 2015
CHICAGO (AP) — Homicides and shootings have doubled in Chicago so far this year compared with the same period in 2015, and police have seized fewer illegal guns — more possible signals that officers have become less aggressive in the aftermath of a shooting video released last fall.
Interim Police Superintendent John Escalante said Tuesday that he was so concerned about officers possibly holding back that he filmed a video for the entire department in which he encouraged them to do their jobs and assured them that a federal probe of the force was not aimed at individuals.
“We are aware that there is a concern among the rank and file about not wanting to be the next YouTube video that goes viral,” Escalante said in the video before introducing a segment of his own to remind viewers “why we took this job and swore this oath of office.”
The statistics come almost exactly three months after the city, on the orders of a judge, released the video of Jason Van Dyke, a white officer, firing 16 shots at Laquan McDonald, a black teen killed in 2014. Since that day, Van Dyke has been charged with murder, and Superintendent Garry McCarthy has been fired. The Department of Justice launched a civil rights probe of the police force, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel has sought to regain public trust in the department and his own leadership.
The crime figures offer a stark reminder that the nation’s third-largest city is nowhere near shedding its reputation for frequent street violence. The vast majority of the bloodshed is happening in neighborhoods on the south and west sides, away from the Loop business district.
Safety over sexy: Airport stops woman with gun-shaped heels
LINTHICUM, Md. (AP) — At the airport, safety is more important than sexy.
That’s what a woman found out at the Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport. Officials say she was stopped Sunday at a security checkpoint with a pair of gun-shaped stiletto heels.
TSA spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein says the stilettos had heels in the shape of handguns and faux bullets around the sole. They were in the woman’s carry-on luggage, along with bracelets lined in faux bullets.
The agency prohibits passengers from carrying “replica guns or ammunition” through airport security checkpoints.
Farbstein says the woman was told that she could put the items in her checked luggage. The woman tried to check the items, but ended up leaving them with the TSA in order to catch her flight.