What Happened: August 6, 2021

The Big Story

Apple will install new “client-side” scanning software on the estimated 1 billion iPhones in use worldwide to root through users’ private data in what the company says is an effort to detect images of child pornography. Using a program called neuralMatch, Apple will scan images stored on users’ phones and compare them to a database of known CSAM (child sexual abuse material), reporting any matches to government authorities. Separately, the company will scan all text messages sent or received by minors, notifying parents if sexually explicit material is found on a child’s phone. The company is creating what is known as a “backdoor” around the encryption that Apple touts as a safeguard to protect individuals’ privacy; the encryption makes their data inaccessible to unauthorized snooping by hackers, governments, and corporations.

Apple has a reputation for going further than other major tech companies to protect users’ privacy: It refused government demands to provide a backdoor to user data during the War on Terror. But this latest move is a gift to governments, providing exactly what former U.S. Attorney General William Barr requested in a 2019 letter: a way around end-to-end encryption. Ars Technica founder and technology writer Jon Stokes tells The Scroll that “at some point we’re going to find that Apple has been heavily cooperating with the Chinese Communist Party’s global surveillance apparatus, and also with the United States’, and the only thing that will be shocking about that is how shocked supposedly tech-savvy people are.”

Read it here: https://thehackernews.com/2021/08/apple-to-scan-every-device-for-child.html

Today’s Back Pages: Your Weekend Reads

The Rest

Hezbollah claimed responsibility for a barrage of at least 19 rockets fired from Lebanon into northern Israel overnight. The attack, which Hezbollah said was retaliation for Israeli air strikes earlier this week responding to an earlier rocket attack, activated the Iron Dome missile defense shield, which shot down 10 rockets. There were no injuries or casualties.
Read it here: https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/rocket-sirens-sounded-on-northern-border-676028

Tablet’s Lebanon correspondent Tony Badran argues that U.S. policy played a role in the attack.

Not “despite.” Hezbollah is leveraging increased US and European investment in Lebanon, especially now, against Israel. Contra the Beirut-DC charlatans, for Hezbollah, the more the US invests in Lebanon the better. It just means the US will pressure Israel more to “de-escalate.” https://t.co/JozNE7TPf2

— Tony Badran (@AcrossTheBay) August 6, 2021

The United States added 943,000 jobs in July, beating out economists’ predictions, and unemployment dropped to 5.4%. Most of the employment gains were in the leisure and hospitality industry, as travel and dining both started to get back to normal. The good news is tempered by the possibility that those same sectors may lose some of those gains as governments respond to the spike in Delta variant COVID-19 cases with new restrictions on public activities.

The Dixie wildfire burning through Northern California grew by 110 square miles between Thursday night and Friday morning, covering a total area of 676 square miles and becoming the third-largest wildfire in the state’s history. A combination of high temperatures and strong winds in recent days accelerated the fire’s spread, but milder conditions are expected over the weekend that should help efforts to contain the blaze.

A new bill introduced by Sen. Marco Rubio would require U.S. tech companies to disclose any “requests or recommendations regarding content moderation” that come from government agencies. Rubio focuses on the pressure Democratic Party officials have applied on social media companies to censor conservatives, but the bill would have broader implications given the routine efforts to intervene in and monitor online activity—such as, for instance, the cryptocurrency market …

Progress on the more than $1 trillion infrastructure bill has gotten hung on the totally non-infrastructure-related question of how to define the role of a broker in cryptocurrency exchanges. There are now competing amendments to the bill offering alternative definitions of broker. All told, the new crypto regulations are currently projected to generate $30 billion toward funding the infrastructure plan.

Missouri Congresswoman Cori Bush, who just scored a major political win for her role in getting the federal eviction moratorium extended, appears to hold the unusual belief that Americans have a universal right to housing but not a right to being safe in their own homes. A major backer of the “defund the police movement,” Bush has also spent almost $70,000 on personal security this year—more than any other member of the House of Representatives. “Defunding the police has to happen. We need to defund the police and put that money into social safety nets, because we’re trying to save lives,” Bush told reporters outside the Capitol. But the Congresswoman denies any hypocrisy in reducing the security budgets for ordinary people while beefing up her own detail. “You would rather me die? Is that what you want to see? You want to see me die?” she told reporters who asked about the apparent contradiction, saying that since the January 6 Capitol riot, her life had been at risk from racist threats.
Read it here: ​​https://thehill.com/homenews/house/566562-cori-bush-defends-private-security-at-capitol-you-would-rather-me-die

China is attempting to halt a looming demographic crisis by lifting the country’s notorious limits on the number of children couples may have. Under the old one-child policy implemented in 1982, couples who had more than the allowed number of children were subject to punishments, from fines and jail time up to forced abortions. Only a few decades after worrying about out-of-control population growth, China now has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world.

Avant-garde Christian humanist rapper Kanye West got down on his knees at a party for his new album attended by estranged wife Kim Kardashian and pleaded, “I’m losing all my family. Darling, come back to me.” This was the second listening party for West’s new album, Donda, named after his late mother, that Kardashian attended. She filed for a divorce from West in February after seven years of marriage. 

A new aerial drone being developed for the U.S. Navy would be able to stay in the air for 90 days straight. The Skydweller, outfitted with solar panels across its 236-foot wingspan, would also have hydrogen fuel cells as a backup energy source.
Read about it here: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2285848-us-navy-is-developing-a-solar-powered-plane-that-can-fly-for-90-days/

The Back Pages

Your Weekend Reads

—In antiquity, shamans and wise men and priests and priestesses had the ability to tell a story that summed up the whole world in the time it took for a wood fire to burn out. You’re lucky these days to master the operations of a new appliance in that amount of time. But this interview with tech investor and cryptocurrency champion Balaji Srinivasan, which covers God, the state, and cryptocurrency, along with just about everything else, is near as close as one can get nowadays to the ancient practice of campfire cosmology.

In the 1800s you wouldn’t steal because God would smite you. In the 1900s you didn’t steal because the state would punish you. But in the 2000s you can’t steal because the Network won’t let you. Either the social network will mob you, or the cryptocurrency network won’t let you steal because you lack the private key, or both.

Put another way, what’s the most powerful force on earth? In the 1800s, God. In the 1900s, the U.S. military. And by the mid-2000s, encryption. Because as Assange put it, no amount of violence can solve certain kinds of math problems. So it doesn’t matter how many nuclear weapons you have; if property or information is secured by cryptography, the state can’t seize it without getting the solution to an equation.

Read it here: https://sotonye.substack.com/p/if-einstein-had-the-internet-an-interview


—More in a series on American Jews exhausting their cultural vitality and becoming the worst thing any Jew can be accused of: boring. The latest entry comes from Samuel Goldman, who documents “How American Jews Lost by Winning”:

In the end, the WASPs chose openness, even though it meant the end of their hegemony. This was less because they embraced liberal theories, as consensus historians imagined, than because they no longer had the energy for cultural and political achievements that might justify their privileges. Like the gentleman-scholars of Corbin’s history department, American Jews are fading into comfortable irrelevance.

Read it here: https://theweek.com/feature/opinion/1003383/how-american-jews-lost-by-winning


—This account of the fate of Seif al-Islam, son of the former leader of Libya Muammar Gaddafi, is also a depressing afterword to the hopeful story of the Arab Spring. Following his father’s assassination, Seif was captured by rebels and held hostage for three years. Then one day his captors had a change of heart, described in this scene:

The two men had participated in the rebellion against Qaddafi, but now the revolutionary unity had collapsed. One of them had a son who was shot in the head during a gun battle with a rival militia from Misurata, a city on the Mediterranean coast. They were bitter, and not just over their personal losses. Hunched over in Seif’s room—there was barely enough space for the three of them—the men cursed the revolution, saying that it had all been a mistake, that Seif and his father were right all along.

Listening to them, Seif told me, he sensed that something was shifting. The revolution was eating its children. Eventually, Libyans would become so disgusted that they would look back on the Qaddafi era with nostalgia. And that, in turn, might give him a chance to reclaim everything he had lost.

Read it here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/magazine/qaddafi-libya.html