Steve Wozniak: Donald Trump Made Me ‘Cry Out Loud’ - TIME

Steve Wozniak: Donald Trump Made Me ‘Cry Out Loud’

Posted: 17 Mar 2016 07:48 AM PDT

On March 18, San Jose, Calif., will host its first-ever comic convention, putting a technologist’s spin on the costume-laden, celebrity-spattered, fantasy-drenched fanfest that another part of California has become so famous for hosting every year. The driving force behind Silicon Valley Comic Con is none other than Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
Before the three-day celebration—which will include appearances from the likes of William Shatner and The Martian author Andy Weir, as well as a “big VR zone” and a panel about the greatest threat to humanity—TIME spoke to the Superman of computer geeks.
Below follows a lightly edited transcript, covering everything from artificial intelligence to Donald Trump to why he thinks there’s no problem with kids having loads of screen time. (Note: If you meet Woz, don’t pitch him your business plan.)
Why is Silicon Valley having its first comic con and how is it different from other ones out there?
The question we ask is: why is it happening so late in time? When you’re around the tech community, so many of them are into the comics and the fantasy it invokes and the superhero movies. It’s like nobody thought of it until now. We want to be a little bit distinct and special, so we’re going to include [technologists] in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. We’re going to include a little bit of that carryover, where science interacts with popular culture. We know that it allows the effects to be made in the movies and all that.
Why do you think people in tech tend to be really into this stuff? 
Probably because we spend our lives turning little ideas that are in our head, which is like science fiction, into things that are real. Having discussions at a dinner, saying ‘Wouldn’t it be neat if somebody could do this?’ And then saying, ‘Oh my gosh, I might even try to find a way. It might be possible!’ That’s what a lot of these movies do for us. Primarily it’s still an entertainment-based show based around pop culture. But we’re making an appearance that we technologists are significant in that world.
Speaking of technologists, I know you have said that you side with Tim Cook in the Apple vs. FBI fight. But what do you think Steve Jobs would have done? 
It’s unfair for someone to guess what Steve Jobs would have done. He’s such a hero to so many people. I just know from being around him—for a lot of things in his life, he really cared about people, the end users, regular people. One time I was with him and the FBI came into Apple, and there were just a few of us, maybe a dozen executives. And they explained how to watch for Chinese people that are trying to get into computers and steal our IP and stuff. There’s was no Internet back then. And Steve Jobs, intelligently, said to the FBI, “Well, we do the same thing right?” And the FBI guy said, “No, we don’t.” In my life I always put honesty above everything else, and it’s just a lie. Why bother to tell it?
I just lose faith in, especially, administrators. I think there’s evidence that Steve Jobs would have been thoughtful on this issue but I can’t say for sure, because people change over time. And I do not know what he would have said, say, at the end of his life. He just really wanted good products for people. And that’s a different issue than whether they should they be totally secure or insecure.
Personal security is an important thing in our lives. Look at all these movies, the stuff you’re going to see at Comic Con. Keeping those things secret is so critical to them. I mean, just look what’s happened to Sony. Steve Jobs, he realized, when you introduce a product, it has to be so secret that it just blows people away—grabs their mind! Just leaves them in awe, just thinking, ‘Whoa, I gotta have that.’ That’s the same thing for popular culture. You’ve got to come out with surprises so people say, ‘Oh my gosh, I gotta buy that comic, just based on the front cover. I gotta buy it today.’ Or, ‘I gotta see this movie.’ It might be as simple as who’s in it.
Secrets are part of security and privacy. If you build a product and it’s very secure, and you’re the one company in the world that keeps your word, then you made a secure product. And encryption. The bad guys, they can always just go and buy 20 different encryption programs. Remember in this case with the FBI versus Apple, they’ve already got all the metadata, every single phone call the phones made, who they were to, what the SMS messages were. They got all the metadata. I don’t know what else they’re going to get. Maybe a loose word in a phone that wasn’t even the person’s real phone, it was their work phone?
What is harder: creating that security or defending that security? 
Well, creating and defending are kind of the same thing. If you asked whether creating or breaking it was harder, I’d say they’re both about equal. You need very, very smart people to get through it. But creating good security is very, very tough. Look how many companies get a hundred thousand records accessed by hackers. A million records accessed by hackers. Twelve million accessed by hackers. You just hear about this over and over and over.
Having a new festival to at least partly celebrate technologists is a reminder of how prominent that culture has become in the Bay Area. There’s been a lot of angst toward tech workers that middle-class people blame for rising rents, the gentrification in the area. Angst toward the Google buses. What’s your take on all that? 
All my life, for different reasons—I kind of grew up during Vietnam War days and opposing authority—I’m always for the little guy and against the big guy who has power and money being able to buy their way. When I grew up, just a normal engineer—engineers don’t make the money that lawyers do—could have a home and cars and school and clothing and food and books, everything for the family, one person working. Now two people in Silicon Valley have to work full-time, stressful jobs just to maybe afford a home. So we lost a lot and where did it all go? We developed computers! My gosh, they made us so much more productive. Where did all that wealth go?
It didn’t really go to us, like ‘Oh, we got it easy. Now we only have to work four days a week.’ Some places in Europe might have gone that way, but we went the opposite. The powers of money control how money makes more money and doesn’t get taxed, whereas those of us who work with our muscles or our brains do get taxed. The money kind of went to the one-percenters and those are the guys who are saying they’re going to save America and bring back the middle class. They’re the ones that took it away.

So you mentioned some political issues. What are your thoughts about Donald Trump? 
Donald Trump is a very rude person. Donald Trump is a very rude person. Would I ever want a child of mine to grow up talking that nastily about other people? Absolutely not. It just offends me. I watched what’s going to be an ad, I guess, of him making comments about women and I was just crying out loud, right here in this chair in my office, just crying out loud at the things that he said. Sometimes people do those things [that make you think], ‘How can that be a human-being person?’ Some of his ideas might be okay but I probably don’t agree with most of them. The Republicans to me just don’t match my own personal ethics. But, you know, if I voted, I would vote for somebody who can’t win. If I do vote, it’ll probably be for Bernie Sanders.
What do you like about Bernie Sanders?
The way he talks, these values. I have friends in those countries in Scandinavia and Western Europe that email me all the time and tell me how wonderful it is what they have, and they can’t believe the U.S. And Bernie Sanders proposes things like getting college paid for. You seen that movie Ivory Tower? So many people are so worried about starting life with such huge debt. He’s for some good things for people, for the people to have benefits, universal healthcare. We have the most privatized healthcare system of all the developed nations, through insurance companies and all. And we have the highest costs and the lowest performance. So it’s time to get more socialistic like the ones that outdo us.
There’s a lot of talk about trying to create more diversity in tech. Is that something you’ve tried to incorporate into Comic Con?
The person who is going to come to Comic Con is an interesting person to me. I hang around just normal workers and engineers in companies. I don’t hang around the higher-up people who make decisions about who they’re going to hire. And I never, ever want to hire and fire. I’ve always been at the bottom of Apple’s org chart, to this day. Most of the people I deal with, everyone I ever run into, thinks ‘Oh my gosh, we should do everything we can to be equal as far as both ethnicity and gender.’ And it doesn’t turn out that way.
A lot of that goes on in the schools. I taught how to use computers in elementary and middle schools. I taught for eight years. I was teaching seven days a week. No press allowed. And let’s look at the gender. The girls and the boys had equal answers. They understood what was going on in the computer at every stage and how to get things done. And by about seventh grade, when they’re getting into the little social problems that teenagers have, the girls who knew the answers wouldn’t raise their hand. And I noticed that.
When I took computer science—I went back to get my college degree after 10 years, at Berkeley—the computer science classes were filled with people from Southeast Asia because they’re very mathematics-smart, they’re very heavily trained in that. And they were 50-50 on gender, whereas we Caucasians were something like 90-10. Different cultures are just different. It’s just how it is in a culture. And it doesn’t mean that it’s good or bad even. As far as pay goes, I have never heard anyone who speaks common sense say that the pay shouldn’t be equal. So the fact that it isn’t is offensive.
What do you think we can do, as a culture, to make it so the girls who stop raising their hands decide to keep them raised up instead? 
It’s way too hard to change in school and education. Almost all the exciting things that took me places were outside of school. The academic institutions have a problem, which is often 30 students in a class, and they’ve all got to do all these different subjects. You can’t even go off and excel at anything, because you don’t have time. You gotta do the reading and the homework. And there’s gonna be a quiz on Friday. I was hoping computers would fix it. But maybe in the future a computer will be like a human being. We’re now talking to our phones. We’re talking to our Amazon Echoes. We ask a question and it speaks back an answer, like another human being. And kids are carrying around their phones like, ‘This is my best friend in the world now. My little portal to the world.’ And if it could ever become a good enough friend to guide them in education, we could have one low-cost teacher per student and really rethink education.
What do you think about people worrying that kids get too much screen time, too attached to those friends in their pockets? 
‘There ain’t no good guy, there ain’t no bad guy. There’s only you and me. We just disagree.’ It’s not bad or good. What we had was good for us, and they’re missing it, so we think they don’t have good, they must have bad. No, they just have something different. It’s their future. It’s the world they live in. It’s their status quo. And I never, ever look at that sort of change in people and society as bad. It’s just the direction of the day. And you know what? Every generation sort of gets accused of that by their parents, no matter what, because they aren’t living the way the parents lived. But that doesn’t make us bad.
What are your thoughts on artificial intelligence? Do you fall more on the side of ‘It will make us immortal’ or ‘It will kill us all’?
We’re going to have a session on this at our comic con: what’s the greatest threat to mankind, artificial intelligence or super babies? I got very worried at one point. I got negative for a while, realizing that these machines are going up and up the scale, from muscles to brains, of what they’re doing better than a human. And why would you want a human, if you’re going to lose money in a company, over a computer? And then I rethought it, and I changed my mind quite a bit for reasons I won’t get into now. I hope a lot of it comes out in our panel.
What are you most excited about seeing a Comic Con? 
Seeing interesting people, just saying a word to them, chatting, looking. The ones that are dressed up in costumes are going to be interesting. And attending the sessions. Looking into some of the sets and casts and movie company presentations. You’re part of a big huge crowd and you can’t go meet 30,000 people. But you might bump into one or two who think like you do, and are like you. Maybe they like the same products or maybe they’re deep, deep fans of one certain genre or one certain movie.
When you meet people, what do they tend to ask you? What are they most curious about? 
Funnily enough most of them just want to say thank you, because they’re so delighted with where technology has gotten us. We are the superheroes as much as the movies used to be. Some of them will talk about how they grew up. Some of them will remind me of a time that we met, which is always good. But I can’t spend forever on people. ‘Here’s my idea. I got this idea for a company. Gosh. Oh, gosh.’ I get 12 of those a day in email and that can take up a lot of time. Don’t waste other people’s time. Be polite. Enjoy the show.
And for the most important question, will you be wearing a costume? 
I will not be wearing a costume. When I was young I’d wear costumes and I’d even win contests sometimes. I was so shy, but behind a costume, it’s like the early days of computers. A shy person who couldn’t talk to people could go in and be anyone they wanted online in chat rooms, on AOL, even before the Internet. And it could really bring a lot out of them. No, I will just be totally normal and comfortable. When I put any clothes on, I sweat and sweat and sweat. So if I put a costume on . . . that’s one of my aversions to it. And why would I hide out when there are people who do want to meet me? Why would I deny them that? All I have to do is smile.

Inside Apple CEO Tim Cook’s Fight With the FBI - TIME Tech

In an exclusive interview with TIME, Cook discusses your privacy, America’s security, and what’s at stake in the battle over encryption

• Lev Grossman / Cupertino, Calif. @leverus
 

6:27 AM ET

The day after the massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., where Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik shot to death 14 people and wounded 22 others at a holiday luncheon for the county department of public health, an FBI Evidence Response Team descended on the couple’s townhouse in nearby Redlands.

They recovered, among other things, 12 pipe bombs, thousands of rounds of ammunition of severaldifferent calibers, and three cell phones: two from a dumpster behind the townhouse and one from the center console of a black Lexus IS 300 parked outside. The two phones in the trash had been crushed by the terrorists, but for whatever reason–maybe an oversight, maybe there was nothing useful on it, who knows–the third phone was intact. It was placed in the care of the Orange County Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory. When investigators booted it up–it was an iPhone 5c running iOS 9, on the Verizon network, serial number FFMNQ3MTG2DJ–the phone asked them for a four-digit pass code.

What followed was like a kid’s game of fortunately-unfortunately. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the pass code, and the person who did was dead. (Farook and Malik were killed in a shoot-out with police a few hours after the attack.) They could have tried to guess it, but the phone was set up to erase itself after 10 wrong guesses. Fortunately, the phone was Farook’s work phone, so technically it belonged to San Bernardino County. Unfortunately, the county didn’t have the pass code either, nor did it have the password for the iCloud account associated with the phone, which in the Apple security ecosystem is different from the phone’s pass code.

But the county did have the power to reset the iCloud password, which it did. That iCloud account turned out to contain several full, unencrypted backups of the phone. Unfortunately, Farook hadn’t backed up his phone to iCloud since Oct. 19, so the data was out of date. Further misfortune: not all the information on an iPhone is necessarily included in a backup.

All that data was still on the phone, but encrypted with a pass code that nobody had. Not even, amazingly, the company that made the phone: Apple.

different calibers, and three cell phones: two from a dumpster behind the townhouse and one from the center console of a black Lexus IS 300 parked outside. The two phones in the trash had been crushed by the terrorists, but for whatever reason–maybe an oversight, maybe there was nothing useful on it, who knows–the third phone was intact. It was placed in the care of the Orange County Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory. When investigators booted it up–it was an iPhone 5c running iOS 9, on the Verizon network, serial number FFMNQ3MTG2DJ–the phone asked them for a four-digit pass code.

What followed was like a kid’s game of fortunately-unfortunately. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the pass code, and the person who did was dead. (Farook and Malik were killed in a shoot-out with police a few hours after the attack.) They could have tried to guess it, but the phone was set up to erase itself after 10 wrong guesses. Fortunately, the phone was Farook’s work phone, so technically it belonged to San Bernardino County. Unfortunately, the county didn’t have the pass code either, nor did it have the password for the iCloud account associated with the phone, which in the Apple security ecosystem is different from the phone’s pass code.

But the county did have the power to reset the iCloud password, which it did. That iCloud account turned out to contain several full, unencrypted backups of the phone. Unfortunately, Farook hadn’t backed up his phone to iCloud since Oct. 19, so the data was out of date. Further misfortune: not all the information on an iPhone is necessarily included in a backup.

All that data was still on the phone, but encrypted with a pass code that nobody had. Not even, amazingly, the company that made the phone: Apple.

different calibers, and three cell phones: two from a dumpster behind the townhouse and one from the center console of a black Lexus IS 300 parked outside. The two phones in the trash had been crushed by the terrorists, but for whatever reason–maybe an oversight, maybe there was nothing useful on it, who knows–the third phone was intact. It was placed in the care of the Orange County Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory. When investigators booted it up–it was an iPhone 5c running iOS 9, on the Verizon network, serial number FFMNQ3MTG2DJ–the phone asked them for a four-digit pass code.

What followed was like a kid’s game of fortunately-unfortunately. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the pass code, and the person who did was dead. (Farook and Malik were killed in a shoot-out with police a few hours after the attack.) They could have tried to guess it, but the phone was set up to erase itself after 10 wrong guesses. Fortunately, the phone was Farook’s work phone, so technically it belonged to San Bernardino County. Unfortunately, the county didn’t have the pass code either, nor did it have the password for the iCloud account associated with the phone, which in the Apple security ecosystem is different from the phone’s pass code.

But the county did have the power to reset the iCloud password, which it did. That iCloud account turned out to contain several full, unencrypted backups of the phone. Unfortunately, Farook hadn’t backed up his phone to iCloud since Oct. 19, so the data was out of date. Further misfortune: not all the information on an iPhone is necessarily included in a backup.

All that data was still on the phone, but encrypted with a pass code that nobody had. Not even, amazingly, the company that made the phone: Apple.

The FBI did ask. “We didn’t hear anything for a few days,” says Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO and the successor to the late Steve Jobs. “I think it was Saturday before we were contacted. We have a desk, if you will, set up to take requests from government. It’s set up 24/7–not as a result of this, it’s been going for a while–and the call came in to that desk, and they presented us with a warrant as it relates to this specific phone.”

At 55, Cook is wiry and silver-haired, with an Alabama accent that he has carefully transplanted to Silicon Valley. We spoke in his office at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino–the address, famously, is 1 Infinite Loop. It’s a modest office, an askew trapezoid, almost ostentatiously unostentatious, with a few framed “Think Different” posters on the walls, some arty photographs of Apple stores and a large wooden plaque with a quote from Theodore Roosevelt on it (the “daring greatly” one). Jobs’ office is next door. It’s dark, with curtains drawn, but the nameplate is still there.

To be clear: Apple complied with, and actively assisted, the FBI’s investigation, right up until it didn’t. There was plenty of cordial back-and-forth, exchanges of information and know-how. “We gave them some unsolicited advice–we said, take the phone to the home or apartment and power it, plug it in and let it back up. And as it turned out, they came back and said, Well, that didn’t work.” It emerged that resetting the iCloud password had been a serious tactical error: they could’ve gotten the phone to make a fresh backup of itself automatically, but once you change the iCloud password, it won’t back itself up without the pass code.

That’s when the FBI made a further request: O.K., Apple didn’t have the pass code, but maybe it could code up a new version of iOS 9 without the 10-guess limit (and without enforced pauses between guesses, another security measure) and then persuade the San Bernardino phone to install it? A four-digit pass code has only 10,000 possibilities. The FBI could brute-force that in a day and everybody could go home.

Inside Apple this idea is nicknamed, not affectionately, GovtOS. “We had long discussions about that internally, when they asked us,” Cook says. “Lots of people were involved. It wasn’t just me sitting in a room somewhere deciding that way, it was a labored decision. We thought about all the things you would think we would think about.” The decision, when it came, was no.

Cook actually thought that might be the end of it. It wasn’t: on Feb. 16 the FBI both escalated and went public, obtaining a court order from a federal judge that required Apple to create GovtOS under something called the All Writs Act. Cook took deep, Alabaman umbrage at the manner in which he learned about the court order, which was in the press: “If I’m working with you for several months on things, if I have a relationship with you, and I decide one day I’m going to sue you, I’m a country boy at the end of the day: I’m going to pick up the phone and tell you I’m going to sue you.”

It also wasn’t lost on Cook that the FBI chose not to file the order under seal: if Apple wasn’t going to help with a case of domestic terrorism, the FBI wanted Apple to do it under the full glare of public opinion.

The spectacle of Apple, the most admired company in the world, refusing to aid the FBI in a domestic-terrorism investigation has inflamed public passions in a way that, it’s safe to say, nothing involving encryption algorithms and the All Writs Act ever has before. Donald Trump asked, “Who do they think they are?” and called for a boycott of Apple. A Florida sheriff said he would “lock the rascal up,” the rascal meaning Cook. Even President Obama, whose relations with the technorati of Silicon Valley have historically been warm, spoke out about the issue at South by Southwest: “It’s fetishizing our phones above every other value. And that can’t be the right answer.”

As against that, Apple has been smothered in amicus briefs from technology firms supporting its position, including AT&T, Airbnb, eBay, Kickstarter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Square, Twitter, Cisco, Snapchat, WhatsApp and every one of its biggest, bitterest rivals: Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, spoke out in Apple’s defense. So did retired general Michael Hayden, former head of both the NSA and the CIA. The notoriously hawkish Senator Lindsey Graham, who started out lambasting Apple, switched sides after a briefing on the matter. Steve Dowling, Apple’s vice president of communications, showed me a check for $100 that somebody sent to support the world’s most valuable technology company in its legal fight. (Apple didn’t cash it.)

You can see what the fuss is about. The optics of Apple’s decision are pretty terrible, and the reasons for it aren’t obvious or simple. The main reason is technical: if Apple created what amounts to a tool for cracking open iPhones, Cook argues (and security experts tend to agree), and that tool got out into the wild, through hacking or carelessness, the security of every iPhone everywhere would be compromised. This is not an unlikely scenario: code, like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, often finds a way to get free. Under this scenario, GovtOS would be the holy grail for hackers everywhere and a gift to authoritarian governments willing and eager to pry into their citizens’ secrets. “To invent what they want me to invent,” Cook says, “puts millions of people at risk.”

To be clear, Cook doesn’t mean people are at risk of having their nude selfies put online. He sees the risks of hacking as real, real enough to weigh against the nightmare of a possible terrorist attack. “It’s not that one side has life and one side is your financial information or your photo or whatever,” he says. “Think about something that happens to the infrastructure, where there’s a power-grid issue. Think about the people who are on a medical device that depends on electricity … these aren’t fantasy things by any means.” (He also doesn’t think that GovtOS would help the FBI much anyway, but more on that later.)

The FBI has argued that the new code could be tailored to just that one phone in particular, but modifying the code to attack other phones would be relatively simple. Apple also maintains (and the FBI has as good as conceded) that this case isn’t a one-off: it will set a legal precedent. And even if Apple deleted the tool as soon as the FBI was done with it, there would be a line around the block of district attorneys clutching iPhones in evidence baggies demanding that Apple write it all over again. “It’s not about one phone,” Cook says. “It’s very much about the future. You have a guy in Manhattan saying, I’ve got 175 phones that I want to take through this process.” (The guy in question being New York County district attorney Cyrus Vance, who did in fact say that.)

This is the technical argument. Apple’s legal argument in the case hinges on the interpretation of the All Writs Act, which is something of a catchall: it authorizes federal courts to issue “all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.” Apple’s lawyers argue that to compel the company to write, test, debug, deploy and document the necessary software would be excessively burdensome and exceed the bounds of the All Writs Act. (This isn’t the first time Apple has been on the business end of the All Writs Act, by a long chalk. In October a similar case came up in Brooklyn involving a meth dealer who claimed to have forgotten his iPhone pass code, and Apple made a similar argument. On Feb. 29 the judge ruled in Apple’s favor, though that ruling has no legal bearing on the San Bernardino case.) Apple also floated a slightly more fanciful claim to the effect that compelling Apple engineers to write code they objected to would violate their First Amendment rights.

But these arguments are just the legal and technical shadows cast by another, larger one, which is that people have a right to privacy, and devices like the iPhone, with which we live on terms of unprecedented intimacy, provide both hackers and law enforcement with a way of invading that privacy like never before. Encryption is the only possible countermeasure. “When I think of civil liberties, I think of the founding principles of this country,” Cook says. “The freedoms that are in the First Amendment, but also the fundamental right to privacy. And the way that we simply see this is, if this All Writs Act can be used to force us to do something that would make millions of people vulnerable, then you can begin to ask yourself, If that can happen, what else can happen? In the next Senate you might say, Well, maybe it should be a surveillance OS. Maybe law enforcement would like the ability to turn on the camera on your Mac.”

It’s an argument in favor not just of privacy but of a new kind of privacy, one forced on us by the utterly changed nature of the technological environment we now live in. Device by device, service by service, we have built over the past decade a world in which an amazing amount of what we do is recorded by our personal devices: our social lives, our health, our money, what we watch, who we talk to, where we go, what we look at. Ten years ago, if I went for a jog, any and all information relating to that jog would evaporate as soon as it happened. It would go uncaptured. Now that information is not only preserved–where I went, how far I went, how fast I went, what I listened to, what my heart rate was–it gets uploaded to the cloud and propagated across my social networks.

The legal scholars Peter Swire and Kenesa Ahmad have coined a phrase for this: the Golden Age of Surveillance. Idly and thoughtlessly, purely because we like the little conveniences and personal services that smart devices give us, we have comprehensively bugged ourselves but good. Devices like Amazon’s Alexa or Samsung’s smart TVs or even Mattel’s Hello Barbie not only monitor the conversation around them but stream it to the cloud to be run through speech-recognition algorithms. They listen and report.

George Orwell knew mass surveillance would invade our homes. The twist he didn’t see coming was that it wasn’t Big Brother who would do it. We did it to ourselves. “It wasn’t very long ago when you wouldn’t even think about there being health information on the smartphone,” Cook says. “There’s financial information. There’s your conversations, there’s business secrets. There’s probably more information about you on here than exists in your home.” The question is, now that we have this deeply, richly, intimately installed new surveillance infrastructure, should Big Brother be allowed to access it? And if so, when and how? Or should private citizens have the means to protect it, from hackers and thieves but also from the government?

Oddly enough, this particular fight has actually been fought before, more than 20 years ago, in what is known as the Crypto Wars. In 1993, jittery in the face of the growing power of encryption, the White House announced a device called the Clipper Chip that would encrypt digital communications while allowing the government to keep a key. Needless to say, the industry resisted the Clipper Chip on any number of grounds, including the fact that it would render American-made communications technology distinctly unattractive to foreign buyers. By 1996 it was effectively dead, and by 2000 the government had thrown up its hands at the whole quixotic business of trying to legislate encryption.

Strong encryption remained the exception rather than the rule, even as American cybersurveillance ramped up in the wake of Sept. 11. But by 2011 law enforcement was getting concerned again about its practical ability to monitor electronic communications. The FBI’s general counsel described them as “going dark,” a phrase that has become something of a rallying cry.

After the Edward Snowden revelations in 2013, some technology companies began integrating encryption more tightly and seamlessly into their products and enabling it as the default setting–Apple’s iOS 8, released in 2014, was a watershed in that respect. Google’s next release of Android did the same. There were already rumblings about encryption legislation long before lightning struck in San Bernardino. Last year, the Washington Post quoted an email from Robert S. Litt, second general counsel in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which speculated, presciently, that the general climate for such legislation “could turn in the event of a terrorist attack or criminal event where strong encryption can be shown to have hindered law enforcement.” And here we are.

Law enforcement has long been accustomed to obtaining warrants to search almost anything it wants, subject to the limits spelled out in the Fourth Amendment. (That’s the one about “unreasonable searches and seizures.”) But encryption creates a new kind of warrant-proof space, a virtual bolt-hole in which private citizens can put the vast amounts of sensitive personal data they generate. It’s still accessible to law enforcement in theory, but in practice it’s impenetrable without a pass code.

FBI Director James Comey put this new predicament starkly in a congressional hearing on the San Bernardino case in February. “Law enforcement, which I’m part of, really does save people’s lives, rescue kids, rescue neighborhoods from terrorists,” he said. “And we do that a whole lot through court orders that are search warrants. And we do it a whole lot through search warrants of mobile devices. So we’re gonna move to a world where that is not possible anymore? The world will not end, but it will be a different world than where we are today and where we were in 2014.”

Comey, who declined to be interviewed on this subject, has framed the conflict as a choice between privacy and security, a zero-sum trade-off. If it were that simple, Apple would have a steep battle indeed: whatever benefits we get from encryption would have to be weighed against the possibility of lives lost to acts of terrorism. But Cook flatly rejects this view as a red herring. “I think it’s very simplistic and incorrect,” he says. “Because the reality is, let’s say you just pulled encryption. Let’s you and I ban it tomorrow. And so we sit in Congress and we say, Thou shalt not have encryption. What happens then? Well, I would argue that the bad guys will use encryption from non-American companies, because they’re pretty smart, and Apple doesn’t own encryption.”

In other words, GovtOS wouldn’t help much, because there’s no legislating away encryption. The bad guys will remain encrypted as ever, no matter what. “The Internet doesn’t have boundaries,” Cook says. “You can wind up getting an app from Eastern Europe or Russia or wherever, it doesn’t matter which country, just outside the United States. And that app would give you end-to-end encryption.” Sure, you might get the data off Farook’s phone, but that’s the last one you’d get. Then you’re back where you started, except worse off, because everybody else’s crypto is now more vulnerable, with their data ripe for the pillaging. You’re only punishing the good guys.

The stakes are rising on both sides. In 2015 alone, the federal Office of Personnel Management was hacked to the tune of 22 million personal records; hackers released 32 million accounts from AshleyMadison.com, a site that facilitates adultery; and Anthem, the IRS and the director of the CIA got hit as well. “Think about the things that are on people’s phones,” Cook says. “Their kids’ locations are on there. You can see scenarios that are not far-fetched at all where you can take down power grids by going through a smartphone.” This isn’t entirely speculative: in December somebody managed to take down part of the power grid in western Ukraine, leaving 230,000 people without electricity. “We think the government should be pushing for more encryption,” he says. “That it’s a great thing. You know, it’s like the sun and the air and the water.”

Except that it protects terrorists as well as good guys. “We get that,” Cook says. “But you don’t take away the good for that sliver of bad. We’ve never been about that as a country. We make that decision every day, right? There are some times that freedom of speech, we might cringe a little when we hear that person saying this and wish they wouldn’t. This, to us, is like that. It’s at the core of who we are as a country.”

Encryption is one of those technological realities that are so ubiquitous and powerful that they alter political realities–it has a whiff of revolution about it. It changes the balance of power between government and governed.

Apple isn’t in the business of revolution, or not that kind anyway. Cook’s emphasis is on the extent to which encryption protects your data from the bad guys, the hackers and other malefactors, rather than from law enforcement–but at the same time he does convey a certain leeriness about the government’s unseemly eagerness to get at personal information. “I’m the FedEx guy,” Cook says. “I’m taking your package and I’m delivering it.” He doesn’t want Apple to be in the position of storing messages for the government to read. “I’m not saying that from a cost point of view or anything else, I’m saying it from an ethics and values point of view. You don’t want me to hold all that stuff. Right? I think you guys should have a reasonable expectation that your communication is private.”

He also points out that the All Writs Act doesn’t specify what kinds of criminal investigations it applies to. “This case was domestic terrorism, but a different court might view that robbery is one. A different one might view that a tax issue is one. A different one might view that a divorce issue would be O.K. And so we saw this huge thing opening and thought, You know, if this is where we’re going, somebody should pass a law that makes it very clear what the boundaries are. This thing shouldn’t be done court by court by court by court.” (Cook can’t completely conceal his irritation at the un-Apple-ish vagueness of the All Writs Act: “You can tell it was written over 200 years ago.” As if to say, they ought to let Jony Ive loose on that thing, get it milled to the proper tolerances, upgrade it to a respectable level of precision.)

Whether it will or won’t be decided by courts is an open question. The FBI, in a series of increasingly strident court filings, has accused Apple of undermining “the very institutions that are best able to safeguard our liberty and our rights: the courts, the Fourth Amendment, long-standing precedent and venerable laws, and the democratically elected branches of government.” It has also threatened, not very subtly, to unleash a nuclear option: subpoena the iOS source code and Apple’s “private electronic signature,” the certificate with which it identifies its code as valid to its devices, which is the software equivalent of the secret name of God.

As for Cook’s talk about privacy and civil liberties, the FBI dismisses it as “marketing.” It’s fair to say that emotions are running high on both sides. “Do I like their tactics?” Cook says. “No, I don’t. I’m seeing the government apparatus in a way I’ve never seen it before. Do I like finding out from the press about it? No, I don’t think it’s professional. Do I like them talking about or lying about our intentions? No. I’m offended by it. Deeply offended by it.”

To be sure, Cook has been positioning Apple as a defender of personal privacy for some time now, at the expense of several of his key rivals–Cook is fond of pointing out that Apple’s business model doesn’t involve harvesting and mining its users’ data the way that, say, Google, Facebook and Amazon do. (At Apple a lack of interest in customer information is practically gospel–Jobs used to claim that Apple didn’t even use focus groups.) Cook’s stance is also of a piece with Apple’s well-known obsession with top-down control of every detail of its products. For the government to come in and get its grubby, inky federal fingers on Apple’s perfect gleaming code must be excruciating at 1 Infinite Loop.

It’s ironic that Cook’s tough stand on privacy has forced him further into the spotlight. By nature he’s as intensely private as the CEO of Apple can be. It also represents another step in a curious trend that has Silicon Valley engineers increasingly acting like statesmen and policymakers, taking positions and making decisions on political and social issues. As more and more of our social and cultural fabric gets integrated into the Internet, power over that fabric is being siphoned off, through mysterious cross-country subterranean channels, from Washington to Northern California. “We’re in this bizarre position where we’re defending the civil liberties of the country against the government,” Cook says. “I mean, I never expected to be in this position. The government should always be the one defending civil liberties, and yet there’s a role reversal here. I still feel like I’m in another world, that I’m in this bad dream.”

Cook is doing his best to wake up. He says he doesn’t actually want to make this decision. What he’s pushing for is to get it out of the hands of a judge and into Congress; a commission could study the issue and presumably propose some sensible laws to clarify it. “We see that this is our moment to stand up and say, Stop and force a dialogue,” he says. “There’s been too many times that government is just so strong and so powerful and so loud that they really just limit or they don’t hear the discourse.” He stresses that whatever the outcome, when the law is handed down, Apple will follow it.

In the meantime, product development in Cupertino will continue to race ahead at the speed of technology, which is considerably faster than that of congressional commissions. It has been reported–though not confirmed–that Apple is evolving a version of the iPhone that even it couldn’t crack, not even with the help of GovtOS. It’s theoretically possible: if, just for example, the 10-guess requirement in iOS 9 could be incorporated into the phone’s hardware, rather than its software, then even modifying the operating system wouldn’t get rid of it. No one talks about future products at Apple–to do so would bring the ghost of Jobs howling back from Silicon Valhalla–but Cook says nothing that makes me think it’s not going to happen. “I would never do what you’re saying with the intention of doing that,” is how he puts it. “Our intention is never anything to do with government. It’s to protect people. Is it a consequence of it? Yes, I mean, over time you do more and more and more. That’s the road we’ve been on for a decade.” The effect would be to render controversies like the present one moot and remove Apple from the legal equation completely, bootstrapping it out like the Lorax.

Cook also suggests that with all those huge invisible billowing clouds of data we leave behind everywhere we go, the encrypted data on phones just isn’t that big a deal anymore. Law enforcement shouldn’t be whining about iPhones; it should be rolling around in all the other free information that criminals and terrorists are spewing through social networks and Nest thermostats, surveillance cameras and Hello Barbies. Apple even has the keys to iCloud backups, which are readily subpoenable, so why get hung up on the device itself? Which, by the way, 10 years ago didn’t even exist? “Going dark–this is a crock,” Cook says. “No one’s going dark. I mean really, it’s fair to say that if you send me a message and it’s encrypted, they can’t get that without going to you or to me, unless one of us has it in our cloud at this point. But we shouldn’t all be fixated just on what’s not available. We should take a step back and look at the total that’s available, because there’s a mountain of information about us.”

Its slightly exasperated tone aside, this argument echoes the findings of a report published in February by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and signed by an impressive roster of legal and security professionals. The report points out that there are powerful trends at work that balance the spread of encryption: the prevalence of business models that rely on mining users’ data; the growth of cloud computing, which puts data on central servers that are more easily accessible; and the proliferation of networked devices referred to collectively as the Internet of Things. “These are prime mechanisms for surveillance,” the report says, “alternative vectors for information-gathering that could more than fill many of the gaps left behind by sources that have gone dark–so much so that they raise troubling questions about how exposed to eavesdropping the general public is poised to become.”

In fact, we seem to be going through two equal and opposite crises at the same time, depending on who you listen to. On the one hand we’re going dark, and on the other we’re giving away our privacy left and right. These are local effects that need to be integrated into a bigger picture. Bottom line: the Internet is a vast, messy, porous place, and that same messiness that makes encryption impossible to regulate also means that however strong and seamless and pervasive encryption gets, it can only ever cover a fraction of the data that flows out of us all day, every day.

The next round in the shoving match between Apple and the FBI is set for March 22, when both sides will appear at a hearing in federal court in Riverside, Calif. Sooner or later, all that shoving will have to yield to a delicate balance, one that takes into account the realities of what encryption is and what it isn’t, and leaves us with a legal framework strong and clear enough to spare us from having to refight the Crypto Wars a third time. “You know as well as I do, sometimes the way we get somewhere, our journey is very ugly,” Cook says. “But I’m a big optimist that we ultimately arrive at the right thing.”

This appears in the March 28, 2016 issue of TIME.

Lyft and Uber Are ‘Allies’ in the Transit Revolution - Fortune

Lyft and Uber Are ‘Allies’ in the Transit Revolution

Posted: 15 Mar 2016 03:32 PM PDT

At a press conference announcing a new study about mobility in American cities on March 15, Lyft’s director of transportation described her company and competitor Uber as “allies.” And it is clear that city transit organizations are increasingly becoming part of the same alliance, one aimed at leveraging software and smartphones to lessen congestion and improve the efficiency of metropolitan transportation.
“We together can have a catalytic impact,” Lyft’s Emily Castor said at an event in Washington, D.C., in a fairly rare moment of solidarity with a company that aggressively competes for the same drivers and passengers in cities across the country.

The study, commissioned by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA), analyzed the usage of personal cars, public transit and other “shared modes”—such as bikesharing, carsharing and the use of ride apps such as Uber and Lyft—in seven major cities: Austin, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C. What the study found is that these newer shared modes complement public transit, are linked to lower rates of car ownership and that public-private partnerships are the way forward.
“Still in their infancy”
Both Uber and Lyft have been working in this arena for some time, positioning themselves not just as a convenience for millennials but also a solution to America’s traffic and carpooling problems.
But as they say in Silicon Valley, this mission is especially part of Lyft’s DNA, which began as a ride-sharing service, while Uber began as a black-car service. On March 14, Lyft announced that the company was launching a new carpooling feature in the app, in partnership with the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission, marking “the first time a government program has partnered with a ridesharing company on a new product.” And it is a harbinger of more partnerships to come, though the study notes that such collaborations are “still in their infancy.”
At the press conference, Uber’s David Plouffe and Lyft’s Castor were both adamant that improving mobility and working with cities to do that will be a focus of the companies’ missions going forward. “The math is the math, our cities are already bursting at the seams,” Plouffe said. “The only way our society is going to deal with that is to have fewer cars on the road.” On March 15, the company announced that it would be expanding its pooling option in the Bay Area down to San Jose, as well as farther-out towns like Hayward and Fremont, making it available to millions.
Plouffe added that taking cars off the road goes hand in hand with putting more people in the cars that remain. As part of the study, the researchers interviewed 4,500 people from those seven cities, and about 40% of them said they frequently drive alone. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the numbers are bleaker nationwide, with more than three of every four people driving to work in an otherwise empty car.
“First mile, last mile”
One area of emphasis among transit reformers is improving what is known as “first mile, last mile” service, referring to a mode of transportation that gets you right to your doorstep or office building either side of infrastructure like a subway or bus that takes you in that general direction. Cities such as Dallas, which was represented at the conference, are working on technology allowing people to buy tickets for all those modes, public and private, in a single app on their smartphone.
Putting the likes of Uber and city-run transit in one place, argued Dallas Area Rapid Transit’s Morgan Lyons, makes public transit “more relevant to people who might not have considered it.” And Lyft’s Castor said that it works the same way for the private companies, citing the positive effects of ad campaigns in places like San Francisco and Chicago that touted the paired use of public transit and Lyft, positioning them not as alternatives but as links in a chain. “We believe by doing that we can access customers that otherwise we wouldn’t be able to access,” Castor said.
The study identified a group that researchers dubbed “supersharers,” those who routinely use shared modes of transportation, and found that since starting to use those shared modes, many of them also started saving money on their transportation costs (30%) and either postponed buying a car (21%) or sold one and didn’t replace it (27%).
Trying to suss out the before-and-after picture is key. Lyft has repeatedly published statistics that, for example, show that big portions of rides in cities like San Francisco or New York originate near train stations. But unless you know what the person taking that ride was doing before they downloaded the Lyft app (e.g. driving their own car and clogging up the road, versus walking, versus taking a bus), it’s hard to understand the full effect these companies might be having on the transportation ecosystem.
In their remarks, Uber and Lyft also emphasized that they’re helping to fill the gaps for people in what are sometimes called “transportation deserts,” those areas in or around a city where public transportation isn’t readily available and cabs aren’t common. “That is something that can really change the equation in terms of transportation access and economic mobility,” Castor said.
According to the study, however, the biggest gaps the companies are currently filling are in the public transportation schedule, particularly late at night and very early in the morning. While about 20% of respondents said they had used transportation apps for their commute or to run errands in the past three months, more than half said they used them for a social or recreational trip. About 100 respondents mentioned, unprompted, that drinking was a factor in that decision.
The “contentious” topics
In addition to the survey, the study involved interviews with public agency officials and employees at private companies, as well as the analysis of data provided by those companies. When the panel at the event was asked about whether this research took into account controversial issues such as the status of workers who make money through ride apps or safety concerns, the first response was that the study simply wasn’t focused on that part of the puzzle. (Plouffe then added that users in generally “feel very secure.”)
The research does acknowledge that questions about how to regulate the likes of Uber and Lyft remain “contentious.” But based on the interviews with public agency officials, it’s clear that there is mutually beneficial ground on the horizon. “Public transit agencies recognize ridesourcing as part of the new urban fabric,” the study notes, adding that city officials are “happy to let private providers lead in developing customer-facing technologies.”
The study and panel also discussed future ways to improve, like figuring out ways to provide more paratransit options for the disabled and focusing on increasing mobility for the elderly—both “highly regulated” areas—as well as figuring out how the services provided by through these apps can be used by people who don’t have money for a smartphone. As APTA chair Valarie J. McCall noted in a fair and fitting cliche, “this is just the beginning.”

China’s Communist Party Is Looking for Answers in Reaganomics - TIME Business

China’s Communist Party Is Looking for Answers in Reaganomics

Posted: 08 Mar 2016 08:59 AM PST

You’ve really got to give China’s Communist Party propagandists an A for effort.
As part of a new roll out of reforms designed to bolster falling growth, the Party PR team has launched a state-approved rap song that puts policy to a back beat. “Reform the supply side, upgrade the economy,” runs the tune. Maybe it looses something musical in translation. But the question is whether it makes any sense economically. “Supply side” economics, a term most associated with the tax cuts and deregulation of Reagan years in America, seems an unlikely reform slogan for China’s state-led economy. After all, the Reagan Revolution represented the kind of naked free-marketism Karl Marx bemoaned and the Chinese revolution claimed it would redress.
But a kind of supply side economics is what’s being pushed this week at the National People’s Congress in Beijing, as leaders acknowledge the existence of “zombie firms” that may require “bankruptcy liquidations.” Translation: policy makers are talking openly about the fact that large swaths of China’s economy are in meltdown, and trillions of dollars of government stimulus has done nothing to offset the fact.
Can supply side economics help China? It depends on how the concept is implemented. Though supply side theory has become synonymous with the laissez-faire, trickle-down Capitalism—which in an age of rising inequality have been largely discredited—the core idea was developed, ironically, by a French economist, Jean-Baptiste Say. Say said that supply—the creation of new goods, products, and services—created its own demand, by dispersing money into the economy in the form of wages and profits, which could then be spent by a rising consumer class. The key and often-forgetten caveat is that Say believed there could be supply and demand mismatches – powerful institutions like the state or large financial firms could distort the rules of the game. Wealth, in effect, didn’t always trickle down if it was being funneled off the side by vested interests.
That’s exactly what’s happening in China now. The Chinese economy has slowed because its outdated economic model, which is predicated on cheap capital and cheaper labor, has stopped working. This is a fact even top policy makers all-but-openly admit. When the U.S. and Europe stopped spending in the wake of the 2008 crisis, China’s export economy tanked, and the government stepped in to prop things up with a stimulus plan of unprecedented proportions. This resulted in a debt bubble that grew three times as fast as the ruinous American subprime bubble. Result: there’s so much debt in the Chinese economy now, that about half of new loans are going to pay off interest on existing ones. This creates a snowball effect of slower growth, which the government has desperately tried to buffer with more credit. This “self reinforcing relationship” is what’s caused the “large disruptions in the financial markets” recently, says Peking University economist Michael Pettis, a highly regarded China observer.
Traditional supply side theory is in compatible with the Middle Kingdom in the sense that it would assume that the government just needs to stimulate more production, and demand will follow. In fact, just the opposite has happened. China’s state-led construction boom has created to ghost cities and asset bubbles. But to the extent that supply siders acknowledge that powerful forces can distort the natural laws of supply and demand, they are on to something. The Chinese state desperately needs to move its economy from a government-led model in which cheap capital of consumers gets funneled into unnecessary and unproductive infrastructure projects. (This only bolsters the wealth of a small minority of very rich people and Party elites, a Venn diagram with considerable overlap.) The country has to find a way to, instead, boost household wages and consumer spending.
That is happening, but slowly. As Pettis points out, consumption has only been rising as a percentage of the Chinese economy since 2012—and only by about 1/5^th the amount that’s needed to really change the model. Meanwhile, debt continues to rise twice as fast as growth—a nosebleed rate that has market watchers worried about more stock crashes and bond defaults.
This means China’s policy makers could actually stand to take some lessons from the Reagan years. Despite all the political rhetoric about a smaller state and less spending, debt—both government and consumer—actually rose during the 1980s in the U.S. That’s because politicians used financial markets and easy money to buffer the fact that the American economy had actually been growing more slowly for years. The potential solutions to the real underlying problem—creating a true national competitiveness program for a more globalized world, reforming education, and figuring out a way to share corporate wealth more broadly—were too contentious to touch. It was basically a continuation of the “guns and butter” debate that began in the 1970s, and led politicians to cede control to the free markets, which proceeded to blow up every so often, a reminder that asset bubbles aren’t the same thing as real growth.
China is going through much the same thing now. (Indeed, the government has actually started repacking subprime type loans to try and offload some of its bad debts.) And so far, it’s unclear what “supply side” reform will really mean in the Chinese context. The government has called for policy proposals from think tanks, which run the gamut from closing down old coal fired power plants to liberalizing financial markets to focusing on creating more upscale goods and services. None of them are bad ideas, but they will only work in the context of fixing the real problem by shifting more of the society’s wealth from government- and state-run corporations to individuals.
It’s impossible to know how China’s version of Reaganomics might accomplish that. What we do know, it didn’t work in the US.

Fact-Checking Donald Trump on Free Trade - TIME Business

Fact-Checking Donald Trump on Free Trade

Posted: 11 Mar 2016 10:02 AM PST

Conversations about trade used to be so simple as to not need articles: free trade good, tariffs bad. But between the surging candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, that has changed radically. This campaign season has reopened the debate around how trade shapes our economy, in often-astonishing ways. And, to a certain extent, the conversation about trade has become a proxy for the one about globalization–is it good for Americans, or bad? The suspicion among voters that elites have been lying to them about the value of trade and globalization for decades is one of the things fueling voter anger and support for both Trump and Sanders.

The truth is mixed. Globalization and “free” trade—the term is a misnomer, really, since it’s never been free—have increased wealth and prosperity at a global level. But they have also increased the wealth divide within countries, in part because these forces created concentrated groups of economic losers in specific parts of our country. One of them, of course, is the Midwestern Rust Belt, where I grew up—that’s why the extent to which both Sanders’ and Trump’s messages resonated in Michigan was no surprise to me at all.
So does that mean that slapping 45% tariffs on American goods, as Trump again admitted might be necessary during the Mar. 10 GOP debate, is the way to go? No. Does it mean Donald Trump would be able to force Chinese president Xi Jinping to change the way his country’s currency is valued? Probably not. But I do think we are entering a new era for trade, because the low hanging fruit in many countries (not just the U.S.) has been plucked. Western elites are going to have to acknowledge something that most on the political right and many on the left have refused to say aloud: free trade doesn’t benefit everyone, all the time. There are winners and losers; the real question is how to properly protect the latter.
On that note, let me fact check some of the points that Trump has been making on the campaign trail, and offer alternates:

1. China’s trading strategy has not, as Trump says, represented the biggest “theft” in the history of the world.China has its own economic and political goals, which are centered around creating as many jobs as possible to avoid the social unrest that would collapse the Communist system. But the country hasn’t “stolen” the majority of U.S. manufacturing jobs. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, the U.S. lost about 1/3^rd of its manufacturing base between 2000 and 2010, some 6 million jobs. Only about 700,000 were lost to China, in “tradable” areas like apparel and electronics. The rest were lost because of decreasing consumer demand in the U.S. and elsewhere, largely as a result of economic downturns like the 2008 crisis.That demand loss particularly impacted areas like cars, white goods, machine tools, and lots of other things that U.S. businesses and consumers alike tend to buy at home. By the way, Americans make 73% of what they buy here at home, as BCG consultant Hal Sirkin recently reminded me, a point worth remembering in all this. On that note, there is a bit of good news: America brought back 1 million manufacturing jobs since 2010. That of course doesn’t alleviate the pain in the Rust Belt, but my article on the new American manufacturingexplains a bit about why the dynamics of the industry are changing in ways that smart U.S. policy could exploit. Unfortunately, none of them are being discussed by Trump. 
2. That doesn’t mean that the global trading system and economy isn’t screwed up and in desperate need of reform. As countries like China and other emerging markets have entered the global trading system, they’ve often not played by the rules of the game developed by the World Trade Organization, the chief referring body for the global economy. Its not just the far right and left that are concerned, but folks at places like the Council on Foreign Relations (see its report on the topic).This fact has many people on both sides of the aisle talking about why we might need to bring back a third rail word–industrial policy. That doesn’t mean the government picking winners, but it does move us toward the government helping connect the private sector and the public sector in new and innovative ways that will keep more good jobs at home. 
3. Bullying China to change its currency policy is of limited value. As Trump tells it, China devalues its currency to “steal” our jobs. There have certainly been some competitive devaluations of the RMB over the years, but overall, Chinese currency has appreciated against the dollar over the last decade. What’s more, when China takes actions to try and manage or manipulate its currency, you can bet there’s more than one thing in play. Recently, for instance, China has been desperate to try and prop up its currency to keep a flood money from leaving the country (a trillion bucks has already flooded out in the last year). That’s one reason why the Chinese react so badly when they are blamed for U.S. job losses: China is desperately trying to keep money and jobs at home, too, as it finds itself loosing both to other, cheaper, emerging markets. 
4. Huge tariffs aren’t the answer. Progressive labor policy is. Tariffs are a tax that everyone pays, while the losses from global trade remain concentrated amongst a smaller group. Helping those folks should be the priority. There are several ways to do that, but let me focus on one straightforward way here: When the next president visits China, he or she will have a big agenda—getting access to Chinese financial markets for U.S. banks, getting intellectual property protection for Silicon Valley companies, and discussing labor standards and wages.Labor rights, usually at the bottom of the list because it’s seen too often as just a human rights issue in faraway places, should go to the top. That’s the right way to show voters supporting Trump and Sanders, many of which are rightfully angry about not being well protected by their government, that the U.S. cares as much about working people as the 1 %. It would also help push China to push up its own wages, which would be a move in the right direction towards rebalancing its own economy. 

Global trade isn’t a zero sum game; it doesn’t have to feel like one. To the extent that Sanders and Trump have opened the debate up, they are doing a service to American workers and workers around the world. But to move forward, many—voters and candidates alike—will have to change, and deepen, their thinking on the topic.

These New Nest Features Could Change Smart Home Technology - Fortune

These New Nest Features Could Change Smart Home Technology

Posted: 10 Mar 2016 07:34 AM PST

Nest is adding two features that will help make its connected products a better fit for the connected home. The first feature uses data from users’ phones to contribute to their home and away settings, and the second lets them add more than one person to the Nest account.
This may seem small, but it represent a shift in thinking. For years the connected device industry has followed the trend of the mobile world, building links between a single person and their device. But with the smart home and the Internet of things, the challenge for device and app makers is to think about building links between a device and the home, which generally contains multiple people.

These two features are a start. The first, Family Account, lets users add up to 10 people to control their Nest devices. Originally, Nest users who wanted to remotely control their thermostat, camera, or smoke detector would log into their app on a mobile phone. But if your spouse was the person who installed and set up the Nest account, you’d have to share a password with him or her if you wanted to also access the device on your own phone.
One solution would be to give your home an email account and let anyone living there have the credentials, but this isn’t something many people will think about in their initial excitement of getting a new Nest product.
The second feature solves the challenge of having the Nest thermostat turn itself into Away mode even if someone is home. The Nest typically decided if people were home by using algorithms and a proximity sensor in the thermostat. But if the thermostat was located in a remote part of the house, it’s possible that people who were home wouldn’t trigger the sensor. At that point the Nest would decide that people were gone and would turn the air or heat off.
Several companies currently offer sensors that can tie into the Nest account to offer more granular information about who is in the home as a way to solve this problem, but Nest has decided to solve the problem for itself. The new feature adds geolocation on phones to determine if someone is home, so even if a person never triggers the sensor, the Nest product knows they are there.
For now this is a simple feature, but Nest could turn it into something far more powerful if it chooses. By using the combo of family accounts and geolocation, Nest can determine not only that someone is home, but who that person it is. That allows Nest to offer an interesting array of features such as setting individual temperature preferences.
If the Nest saw only I was at home, based on the cell phone information, it might set the temperature to my preferred setting. Thanks to integrations with other companies it might also change lighting preferences and more using the additional data. It’s a neat way to offer personalization if users opt in to these new features.
The Home/Away Assist and Family Accounts features are available by downloading the latest Nest update.
This article originally appeared on Fortune.com

Aung San Suu Kyi picks close aide to be Myanmar president - Financial Times

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d642925c-e684-11e5-ac45-5c039e797d1c.html#ixzz42VFbqLai

March 10, 2016 6:29 am

Aung San Suu Kyi picks close aide to be Myanmar president

Michael Peel in Singapore

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Htin Kyaw, pictured with Aung San Suu Kyi in 2010

Aung San Suu Kyi has picked a long-time confidant to become Myanmar’s history-making new president, after failing to overturn a controversial constitutional clause that blocks her from the top job.

Htin Kyaw, a friend of 20 years who runs a charity for the veteran pro-democracy leader, was chosen for what she has said will be a proxy job to carry out her decisions.

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Thursday’s nomination by the lower house of parliament dominated by Ms Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy will need to be approved by a vote of the full legislature, notching another landmark in the country’s long transition from military rule. The NLD has comfortable majorities in both houses of parliament, so it would be a big surprise were her choice to be rejected.

Mr Htin Kyaw, a 70-year-old author and Oxford university graduate, has been an adviser to Ms Aung San Suu Kyi since the 1990s and the start of her 15 years of house arrest. The new president will from 1 April lead a government to replace the military-backed administration, which has held power since the ruling junta of almost 50 years stepped down in 2011.

Mr Htin Kyaw’s nomination is final confirmation that Ms Aung San Suu Kyi will be denied the honour of leading the first administration since the 1960s to be chosen after a full, free and fair election. The NLD made a late effort to use its sweeping mandate from November’s poll to bargain with the still-powerful military for a change in the constitution, but talks broke down.

Ms Aung San Suu Kyi’s domestic and international supporters will be disappointed she has not managed to take the top job and fulfil what many people see as the legacy of her father, a murdered nationalist hero. But excluding her from the presidency has for years been the strategy of a military that has carefully controlled the political transition and still holds important positions in parliament, ministries and a committee with powers to overrule the legislature.

“The Myanmar story has never really veered far from the basic plot set 10 years ago,” tweeted Thant Myint-U, a historian and analyst, who advised the outgoing government on its internal peace process. “Observers looking for a dramatic climax miss the point.”

He added that Mr Htin Kyaw was “a stellar choice, well respected, unimpeachable integrity and a very nice man”.

Earlier on Thursday Ms Aung San Suu Kyi, who is banned from the presidency because her two sons hold foreign passports, called for people to be patient as the country seeks to shake off military rule. Her party has been waiting months since a landslide election victory in November, stoking already high expectations about what a government steered by the woman known to many simply as “The Lady” can achieve.

“I would like to appeal for people to support and stand by the NLD with wisdom and farsightedness,” she said. “The NLD is determined to meet people’s expectations and will do its best.”

Under Myanmar’s constitution, Mr Htin Kyaw is one of three people nominated — by each house of parliament and the military — to contest the presidency and two vice-presidential posts. The NLD has also chosen Henry Vantriu, a member of the Chin minority whose ancestral home is close to Myanmar’s borders with India and Bangladesh. The identity of the military’s pick is still not known.