TOPIC-1: Apple stands up to
surveillance.
Apple CEO
Tim Cook’s revelation this week that the
U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation wants his company to take the “unprecedented step” of hacking into the iPhone 5
device used by terrorists in the San Bernardino, California attack in December
2015, highlights the complexity that the world today faces in simultaneously pursuing two
well-meaning goals: digital security and national security. The problem is, it
seems that one cannot be pursued without jeopardising
the other. Mr. Cook, who opposes the order, is clearly privileging the former, while the FBI is
interested in the latter. The CEO was quick to explain that as a matter of
policy Apple regularly complied with valid subpoenas
and search warrants, including in the San Bernardino case, in which he said
Apple had made its engineers available to advise the FBI. However, in opposing
the FBI’s order, his remarks represent the sharpest public protest by any of
the Silicon Valley tech giants against the post-Snowden U.S. surveillance state. In this, he has also got
support from tech heavyweights such as Google and Microsoft. Their defiance is understandable. For the tech giants,
compliance with such orders can easily put at risk the value proposition of
data protection they pitch to their
users, thereby putting their businesses in peril.
As more and more of our lives get played out in the digital world, more
advanced security features will inevitably
become central to their offerings in the future. Mr. Cook knows this well — his
note was addressed to the customers.
According to Mr. Cook, the FBI has
asked Apple to produce a new version of the iPhone operating system (OS) that
would circumvent critical security
features such as the automatic memory wipe
that happens when the wrong login code is entered 10 times. The authorities,
Mr. Cook said, intend to have this new operating system installed on the
government-owned iPhone recovered during the investigation of the San
Bernardino attack, yet there may be no guarantee that the government would
limit the use of this special OS to this device alone. Mr. Cook’s discomfiture with complying
with the FBI’s request has to do with — and rightly so — the lurking risk that the iPhone hack programme that
Apple considers “too dangerous to create” would inevitably produce backdoor
access to all iPhones. After all, the debate stirred
up by Edward Snowden resulted in an effective end to the bulk collection of the
phone records of millions of Americans. Such progress would be undone if new surveillance
weapons were built and entrusted to the NSA. Yielding to this one ask, which
the FBI proposes to enforce via the 227-year-old All Writs Act, could bring in
a flood of such requests from around the globe, including from regimes where the legal framework to constrain cyber-snooping operations may be far
from adequate with regard to protecting the civil liberties
of citizens. The argument that this is for a one-off case is thus weak. As the
technologists know, there may be little that is exclusive or one-time about
special access.
VOCABULARY:
1.revelation
: the speech act of
making something evident.
2.unprecedented :
never done or known before.
3.pursuing :
follow or chase (someone or something).
4.jeopardising :
put (someone or something) into a situation in which there is a danger of loss,
harm, or failure.
5.privileging :
exempt (someone) from a liability or obligation to which others are subject.
6.subpoenas : a
writ ordering a person to attend a court.
7.surveillance : close observation of a person or group
(usually by the police).
8.defiance :
intentionally contemptuous behavior or attitude.
9.pitch : the
property of sound that varies with variation in the frequency of vibration.
10.peril : a
source of danger; a possibility of incurring loss or misfortune.
11.inevitably : in
such a manner as could not be otherwise.
12.circumvent : surround so as to force to give up.
13.wipe : remove
or eliminate (something) completely.
14.discomfiture : anxious embarrassment.
15.complying : act
in accordance with a wish or command.
16.lurking : be or
remain hidden so as to wait in ambush for someone or something.
17.stirred :being excited or provoked to the
expression of an emotion.
18.regimes : a
government, especially an authoritarian one.
19.constrain : compel or force
(someone) to follow a particular course of action.
20.liberties : a
right or privilege, especially a statutory one.
TOPIC-2: The
emperor’s new nationalism.
From Hyderabad to Jawaharlal Nehru
University, from the death of Rohith Vemula to the arrest of Kanhaiya Kumar, a
clear political agenda by the ruling
Bharatiya Janata Party can be discerned.
At first flush, this is a party whose top
leaders — and they include members of the Union Cabinet — are all too willing
to pick fights with student leaders and give establishment cover to the Akhil
Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the Sangh’s student wing. But to see events that
have unfolded over the past week only as the government’s battle for
ideological control for India’s universities, as real and as condemnable as the effort is, would be to miss the
gravity of the moment. In the national capital this week, the Home Minister
gave currency to parody accounts of
Pakistani terrorists to build a case against JNU students and yet remained
visibly unmoved by the obstinate refusal
of the city’s police force, which comes under his charge, to arrest
“nationalist” lawyers and a party MLA who beat up students on and around court
premises. BJP spokespersons affected condemnation of the violence, but breathed
outrage about the allegedly seditious
sentiments voiced at a meeting on the JNU campus to mark the death anniversary
of Afzal Guru, convicted in the 2001 Parliament attack case and hanged in 2013.
Such false equivalence has never been
seen since Independence, between a Central government virtually refusing to
honour the state’s essential compact with its citizenry to enforce the law and
the right of Indians to freely express their sentiments, that too in the
especially free zone that university campuses are meant to be. And its utterance should frame an anxiety the Prime Minister must respond to, that
“nationalism” is being adopted as a political and executive touchstone by which Indians are sought to be
divided between those with the ruling dispensation
and those not.
Besides taking the fight to the
country’s campus that is most identified with Left politics, the JNU
development was obviously a chance for
the BJP to recover from the excesses of Hyderabad. With it, the party has
reframed the ABVP’s adoption of “nationalist” outrage from a Sangh versus Dalit
binary to one in which the identities of “anti-nationalists” are insinuated, and not overtly specified. It is,
thus, a curious overlay to agitations over the JNU incidents that all Central
universities are now required to fly the national flag. It is a dangerous phase
in this country’s history when the government at the Centre is seen to be
actively assisting in a right-wing effort to shape the discourse on
nationalism. This is why the use of Section 124-A of the Indian Penal Code on
sedition acquires greater menace than in instances in the past, when it has mostly
been used by thin-skinned politicians to fend
off critiques. Its application against
JNU students and the unchecked violence against students and activists at
Delhi’s Patiala House courts have sent out a message that the rule of law could
be enforced selectively. If Prime Minister Narendra Modi differs from this dark
reading of events, he needs to speak up.
VOCABULARY:
1.agenda: a temporally organized plan for
matters to be attended to.
2.discerned
: distinguish (someone or something) with difficulty by sight or with the other
senses.
3.flush :
the period of greatest prosperity or productivity.
4.condemnable : bringing or deserving severe rebuke
or censure.
5.parody :
a composition that imitates or misrepresents somebody's style, usually in a
humorous way.
6.obstinate : persist stubbornly.
7.refusal :
the act of refusing.
8.outrage :
a feeling of righteous anger.
9.allegedly : used to convey that something is claimed to be the case or have taken
place, although there is no proof.
10.seditious : inciting or causing people to rebel against the authority of a state or
monarch.
11.equivalence : a state of being essentially equal
or equivalent; equally balanced.
12.utterance : the use of uttered sounds for
auditory communication.
13.anxiety : a vague unpleasant emotion that is experienced in anticipation of some
(usually ill-defined) misfortune.
14.touchstone : a basis for comparison; a reference
point against which other things can be evaluated.
15.dispensation : an exemption from some rule or obligation.
16.obviously :unmistakably (`plain' is often used informally for `plainly')
17.insinuated : suggest or hint (something bad) in an indirect and unpleasant way.
18.menace :
something that is a source of danger.
19.fend :
try to manage without help.
20.critiques : a detailed analysis and assessment of something, especially a literary,
philosophical, or political theory.
