Billions at stake in Apple encryption case

February 19: It’s a dispute that pits two important principles against each other. It’s about the right of the U.S. government to investigate thoroughly the most deadly terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11 versus the right of the most valuable (and iconic) American company to go about its business without the same U.S. government undercutting the key promise it makes consumers — that their most private communications are kept safely under lock and key.

It’s also a dispute that sets the stage for what promises to be one of the great commercial battles of the next years, between the U.S. government and the tech companies that are the most important engine of the booming American economy.

The FBI has argued for years that it faces a “going dark” problem, that its investigations of everything from child pornographers to terrorists are hampered, or even completely undercut, by the fact that so much Internet communication is now encrypted to a level that the U.S. government can’t break.

As a result, the FBI wants a “backdoor” into the encrypted communications platforms engineered by American tech companies.

The tech companies reject this demand on the basis that such a backdoor defeats the whole purpose of encrypted communications since if a backdoor exists, not only can the FBI use it, but also so can others.

The companies argue — quite properly — that when you build a fence around your house to keep out intruders you don’t leave a big hole in the fence for the easy access of police in the event that a crime might take place inside the house, because others can also exploit that big hole.

Apple’s position, however, is that helping the FBI to decrypt Farook’s iPhone would give the government access to all other similar iPhones and would also lead to an unfortunate precedent in which the government could eventually access encrypted communications on any American tech platform. Google has publicly supported Apple’s position.

So who is right here? The revelations by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden in 2013 about just how much U.S. tech companies had been playing footsie with the U.S. government had an effect on the firms’ bottom lines around the globe.

What explains the biggestgues at the New America think tank estimated that the Snowden revelations cost U.S. tech companies billions of dollars.

ISIS also advocates to its followers to use the “dark Web” Tor browser, which disguises users’ IP addresses and is not controlled by any American tech company.

In other words, once again, technology is outrunning the ability of both law enforcement and legislation to keep pace with it.CNN

“That suggested these neurons are important for the isolation-induced rebound in sociability,” Tye says. “When people are isolated for a long time and then they’re reunited with other people, they’re very excited, there’s a surge of social interaction. We think that this adaptive and evolutionarily conserved trait is what we are modeling in mice, and these neurons could play a role in that increased motivation to socialize.”

Social dominance

The researchers also found that animals with a higher rank in the social hierarchy were more responsive to changes in DRN activity, suggesting that they may be more susceptible to feelings of loneliness following isolation.

“The social experience of every animal is not the same in a group,” Tye says. “If you’re the dominant mouse, maybe you love your social environment. And if you’re the subordinate mouse, and you’re being beat up every day, maybe it’s not so fun. Maybe you feel socially excluded already.”

The findings represent “an amazing cornerstone for future studies of loneliness,” says Alcino Silva, a professor of neurobiology, psychiatry, and psychology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA who was not involved in the research.

“There is something poetic and fascinating about the idea that modern neuroscience tools have allowed us to reach to the very depths of the human soul, and that in this search we have discovered that even the most human of emotions, loneliness, is shared in some recognizable form with even one of our distant mammalian relatives — the mouse,” Silva says.

Mark Ungless, a senior lecturer at Imperial College London, is also a senior author of the study. MIT graduate students Edward Nieh and Caitlin Vander Weele are also lead authors. CNN