E Another Byte Of Apple

Called a ‘wedge’ during flight – a flock of swans (black or otherwise) every so often need to rest, or feed, so essentially they’re fueled for their journey’s next leg. When in flight a glance upward at the ‘bevy’ (another term for flying swans) won’t easily discern which are the boy swans (cobs) and which the girls (pens).

So it is with the current day-to-day debate about the bull vs. bear short-term; at the same time a reasonable observer would accept that the ‘flight’ is underway; and that it began as we contended, via the launch around last year’s ‘migration’ away from excessive price levels, sustained by waning Fed support and all the buybacks that artificially perpetuated impressions of better growth or earnings, as in realty were already deteriorating while many ignored substantiating facts.

That’s true now as well; whether looking at the European bank problems (by no means resolved; just jawboning out there to ease mass concern developing); of course looking at China (where everything seemingly quieted down; but nothing has changed to ease their debt problems or slowing economic growth pace); or for that matter the Middle East (where risk of conflict between Russia & Turkey is far underestimated by most observers; even though it really is sort of lunacy).

Another Byte of Apple

That’s also the case with respect to politicians getting involved in trying to stick Apple (AAPL) cured County Government owned iPhone, used by it’s deceased terrorist employee. I mention that because this is a complex case we suspected could backfire on a favorable ‘initial’ press statement by Apple, especially if they later capitulated in a way that reduced confidence in everything stored on an iPhone being secure.

It matters to everyone; including our enemies (corporate not just political), and has not been elevated to a level that is really healthy in one respect: it denotes the extent to which our ‘technocrat’ society has become digitally-dependent. By the quirky nature of what brought this long-simmering (since Snowden mostly) issue to the front-burner, and the unanimity of desire to uncover terror plots and understand more than the particular issue; we’ll finally find out whether security ‘trumps’ privacy; or whether the ability of Apple to create ‘real’ encryption got to a point where potentially even legal warrants can’t exhume data, without maybe it appears (emphasis on the ‘maybe’) opening a Pandora’s Box comprising our ‘real’ or ‘grander’ National Security, and hence more cyber-warfare concerns.

Yes the rhetoric got that carried away Friday, and at least it’s better understood that this apparently was never so simple as the White House put it; just extract the information from one phone used by a terrorist. Seems like (given technical ability) Apple was (and has in the past) done just that. The compelling order of Friday focuses on the urgency of the one phone; but the demand is still for the ability to access more than that (hence the backdoor key concern), which would take more than a short-term to reverse engineer (essentially). That’s sort of the impression the ‘hurry-up’ aspect generates; as what seems like an effort to try to push-aside the bigger picture of what has legal and practical complications.