Apple's Tim Cook - Amazing, Although Not One of Alabama's Favorite Sons

I happened upon a piece in the Washington Post that looks at Apple CEO Tim Cook - the only openly gay head of a major Fortune 500 company - and his roots in tiny Robertsdale, Alabama, located between Mobile, Alabama, and Pensacola, Florida, on the road to Gulf Shores which is sometimes called part of the "redneck Riviera" although locals refer to the area as "LA" - lower Alabama. It's an area I know form my years with an old aristocratic law firm in Mobile right out of law school, although the entire time I lived on the east side of Mobile Bay and closer to Robertsdale.  The Post piece shows several things, not the least of which is that one's small town beginnings do not necessarily define one's future potential.  The second thing it shows is the animus that gays still face in many parts of Alabama, especially in the more rural and small town regions.  Here are some article excerpts:

ROBERTSDALE, Ala. — There are few clues that this is the home town of Apple chief executive Tim Cook, the place where he said his “most improbable journey” began and where he forged the beliefs that today put him at the center of a national debate over privacy.

His name is not noted on the town’s welcome signs along the main drag, Route 59. There’s nothing in the local chamber’s brochures, and the local paper rarely has anything about him. His old high school keeps a glass case celebrating former NFL running back Joe Childress, Class of 1952, but not the leader of the world’s most valuable company, Class of 1978.

Walking around the town and talking with residents, it can feel as if Cook is a forgotten favorite son.

“I kinda wonder about that sometimes, I really do,” said Rick Ousley, a former classmate who recalls Cook fondly and now runs a computer repair shop in town.

Cook never sought out attention and many here are quietly proud of him, but Ousley suspects the lack of recognition is also tied to Cook’s prominent positions on sensitive social issues. Cook, who is gay, has advocated for gay rights. He once criticized Alabama for its lack of progress in a speech at the state capitol in Montgomery. He also helped fund a gay rights initiative in the Deep South.

“That was offensive to a lot of people down here,” Ousley said. One local pastor even vowed to stop using his iPad because of the Apple leader’s views.

Now, Cook, 55, has taken another risky stand, this time on privacy. He and Apple are fighting a federal court order demanding the Silicon Valley firm help the FBI crack the passcode-locked iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino terrorists. The FBI has accused Cook of only wanting to protect Apple’s brand. But Cook, in his soft Southern drawl, has repeatedly argued the FBI’s request is wrong in moral terms, calling it “bad for America.”

Cook’s experiences growing up in Robertsdale – detailed by him in public speeches and recalled by others — are key to understanding how a once-quiet tech executive became one of the world’s most outspoken corporate leaders. Apple has long emphasized the privacy of its products, but today Cook talks about privacy not as an attribute of a device, but as a right — a view colored by his own history.

For Cook, it was in this tiny town midway between Mobile, Ala., and Pensacola, Fla., that a book-smart boy developed what he calls his “moral sense.”

Cook seemed too aware of the injustices around him.  “I have to believe that growing up in Alabama, during the 1960s and witnessing what he did, especially as someone who is gay, he understood the dangers of remaining silent,” said Kerry Kennedy, a human-rights activist who has met Cook several times and whose father, Robert F. Kennedy, Cook considers one of his heroes.

In the early 1970s, he was riding his new 10-speed bicycle at night along a rural road just outside Robertsdale when he spotted a burning cross. He pedaled closer. He saw Klansmen in white hoods and robes. The cross was on the property of a family he knew was black. It was almost more than he could comprehend.

Without thinking, he shouted, “Stop!” The group turned toward the boy. One of them raised his hood. Cook recognized the man as a local deacon at one of the dozen churches in town, but not the one attended by Cook’s family.  The man warned the boy to keep moving.

“This image was permanently imprinted in my brain and it would change my life forever,” Cook recalled in a speech in 2013, an incident that he also has recounted to friends.

He made frequent visits to the small Robertsdale library, where he found a copy of “To Kill a Mockingbird” – published only a few years earlier — and devoured the story of a trial exposing the dangers of racism in a fictional Alabama town.

Growing up gay in small-town Alabama a generation ago meant knowing the value of privacy, recalled Paul Hard, 57, who was raised in tiny Demopolis, Ala. He doesn’t know Cook, but imagines what he went through, because he went through it himself.

Cook pushed this point even further when he took over Apple in 2011. He advocated for gay rights and to change laws in states such as Alabama, where employees can be fired for being gay. He criticized states with “religious freedom” laws that seemed to him to sanction some forms of discrimination.

Last December, shortly before the fate of a terrorist’s iPhone would explode onto the national scene, he accepted the Ripple of Hope award from the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.

In his speech, Cook talked about learning to “take a stand for what is right, for what is just.”  And when the terrorist’s iPhone case erupted last month, Cook returned to that “moral sense” he learned back in Robertsdale.

There are many wonderful people in Alabama and just last Saturday evening the husband and I hosted a going away party for amazing friends moving back to Alabama for family reasons. Likewise, many Alabamians are kind and gracious, but more of them need to speak out and refuse to be silent as others in the state continue to tie the state's name to hate and bigotry. 

2nd Circuit Court of Appeals Rules that NSA Telephone Data Collection Illegal

This blog has repeatedly maintained that the bulk collection of telephone metadata by the National Security Agency is illegal.  Today, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit confirmed this view by finding that the telephone medadata collection was illegal.  The scope of the now confirmed illegal domestic surveillance of Americans was first revealed by Edward Snowden who is now facing federal charges for in effect alerting the public to the fact that the NSA was breaking the law.  With the new court ruling, Congress will be forced to address the lawlessness of our national security agencies.  The infighting and partisanship should make for great spectator sport.  Here are highlights from Politico:

A court ruling Thursday against the National Security Agency’s phone data collection sparked a war of words between the Senate’s leaders over the future of the program — with little hope of a quick breakthrough.

With lawmakers facing a May 31 deadline to extend or reform parts of the PATRIOT Act, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Harry Reid both refused to cede ground.

“According to the CIA, had these authorities been in place more than a decade ago, they would have likely prevented 9/11,” McConnell said on the floor of the chamber. He called soon-to-expire provisions of the PATRIOT Act “ideally suited for the terrorist threat we face in 2015.”

Reid, meantime, called for an immediate vote on the USA Freedom Act, a surveillance reform bill advancing in the House that would end the telephone metadata program.

“Instead of bringing the bipartisan NSA reform bill up for a vote, Sen. McConnell is trying to force the Senate to extend the bulk data collection practices that were ruled illegal today,” he said. “It would be the height of irresponsibility to extend these illegal spying powers when we could pass bipartisan reform into law instead.”

The court decision injected a new element of uncertainty into the already rancorous debate in Congress over whether to extend the PATRIOT Act provisions, including Section 215, used to justify the NSA’s bulk data collection, first revealed by Edward Snowden’s leaks. If Congress doesn’t act by May 31, the provisions will expire.

Reid’s office threw cold water on the idea of a short-term solution, saying he “will use the tools at my disposal to stop any attempt to extend these powers for any length of time without reforming them.”

Privacy zealots from both parties on Thursday applauded the court decision, saying it should grease the skids for lawmakers to approve the USA Freedom Act.

“Today’s federal appeals court ruling confirms what we’ve been saying all along: Bulk collection of data is not authorized under the law and is not accepted by the American people,” said Reps. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), John Conyers (D-Mich.), Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) and Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), who are all sponsors of the USA Freedom Act in the House.

National security hawks were quick to question the ruling’s durability, citing the potential for other courts to weigh in and the possibility of an appeal to the Supreme Court.

What the NSA has been doing would have been a dream come true for Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin and other ruthless dictators.   It speaks volumes as to how much freedom of privacy American citizens have lost.  Currently, America ranks among the worse nations in the world when it comes to domestic surveillance and lack of personal privacy. 

Report Shows Mass Surveillance of Citizens by Postal Service

Just when you thought there's little more the U.S. Government could do to spy on you, a new report comes out that confirms that in addition to spying on Americans telephone calls, e-mails, and Internet usage, the government has been snooping through our snail mail too.   And the oversight is lacking. As noted before on this blog, Americans' expectations for personal privacy rank on a par with Russia and China, not exactly pinnacles of American ideals of freedom.  Meanwhile most of Europe and South America rank far better when it comes to citizens' privacy rights.  A piece in Slate looks at this new exposing of domestic spying on Americans.  Here are some highlights:

In a post-Snowden world, most people are aware that the government—any government—is pretty interested in emails. They’re not that into you, just your metadata, so the theory goes. In national security-speak, governments like to call the words that we use to make up the sentences we write that are then sent to people we know via electronic mail—data. We used to call data, you know, postcards, and thank you notes, but times have changed. Or have they?

A buried internal audit by the United States Postal Service popped up in the New York Times on Tuesday, showing the USPS approved a whopping 50,000 requests to secretly monitor Americans’ mail last year alone. The justification for the surveillance effort was familiar one—the data was needed to aid criminal and national security investigations. Even more unsurprising is the audit showed “the surveillance program is more extensive than previously disclosed and that oversight protecting Americans from potential abuses is lax,” the Times reports. “The audit, which was reported on earlier by Politico, found that in many cases the Postal Service approved requests to monitor an individual’s mail without adequately describing the reason or having proper written authorization.”

At the request of state or federal law enforcement agencies or the Postal Inspection Service, postal workers record names, return addresses and any other information from the outside of letters and packages before they are delivered to a person’s home. Law enforcement officials say this deceptively old-fashioned method of collecting data provides a wealth of information about the businesses and associates of their targets, and can lead to bank and property records and even accomplices. 

The Postal Service also uses a program called Mail Imaging, in which its computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail sent in the United States. The program’s primary purpose is to process the mail, but in some cases it is also used as a surveillance system that allows law enforcement agencies to request stored images of mail sent to and received by people they are investigating.

Feel like you have any privacy left?

Snowden Denies Suggestions That He Was a Spy

Some of the usual suspects in Congress are alleging that Edward Snowden was a spy working for Russia, something that Snowden specifically denies.  In my view, it is a case of trying to change the subject away from the illegality of the actions of the National Security Administration and tar the whistle blower.  I continue to believe that Snowden did Americans a huge service by exposing what our government has been doing - all in our name, of course.  As for Senator Dianne Feinstein's remarks, she'd best not ask me for any money or anything else any times soon.  The New York Times looks at the accusations and Snowden's denial.  Here are excerpts:

Edward J. Snowden on Tuesday adamantly denied as “absurd” and “smears” the suggestion by the leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees that he might have been a Russian spy when he downloaded archives of classified National Security Agency documents and leaked them to journalists.

In an interview with The New Yorker, Mr. Snowden declared that the accusation — advanced in particular by Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee — was “false,” saying he had “clearly and unambiguously acted alone, with no assistance from anyone, much less a government.”

In the latest jostling over how to frame the public debate that Mr. Snowden’s leaks created, Mr. Rogers said on the NBC News program “Meet the Press” on Sunday that Mr. Snowden should be seen not as a whistle-blower but as “a thief, who we believe had some help.”

Officials at both the N.S.A. and the F.B.I. have said their investigations have turned up no evidence that Mr. Snowden was aided by others. But Mr. Rogers, asserting that Mr. Snowden had downloaded many files about military activities that do not involve issues of civil liberties, pointed to the Russian Federal Security Service, known as the F.S.B., the successor to the Soviet K.G.B. He offered no evidence.

“I believe there’s a reason he ended up in the hands, the loving arms, of an F.S.B. agent in Moscow,” he said, adding: “I believe there’s questions to be answered there. I don’t think it was a gee-whiz luck event that he ended up in Moscow under the handling of the F.S.B.”

Mr. Rogers made his remarks two days after President Obama embraced some calls to reform certain N.S.A. activities brought to light by Mr. Snowden. In particular, Mr. Obama said he would impose greater court oversight on the once-secret program in which the agency has been collecting records of every American’s phone calls, and that he intended to eventually get the N.S.A. out of the business of gathering such records in bulk.

On Sunday, the “Meet the Press” host, David Gregory, also asked Mr. Rogers’s Senate counterpart, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, whether she agreed with his suspicions that Mr. Snowden had been helped by the Russians. She replied: “He may well have.”

Mr. Snowden criticized news organizations for treating such remarks as newsworthy.  “It’s not the smears that mystify me,” Mr. Snowden told The New Yorker, “it’s that outlets report statements that the speakers themselves admit are sheer speculation.”