"Don't sit under the Apple tree...with anyone else but me...."

The case between DoJ and Apple is one of those defining moments coming ever since Al Gore backed the Clipper Chip for backdoor get devices 20 years ago. While we expected things to get worse under Bush, most of us are gobsmacked to see the continuation of Bush-era security overreach under Obama.

Sadly this is one area where Bernie could draw Hillary out, drive her to the left without evoking Cuba or other negatives, and would be doing us all a favor. But so far (AFAIK) crickets.

I'm quite forgiving of foreign policy mistakes under duress, responding to crisis. I give quite a pass even for helping overthrow Libya, even though at the time I thought it was a huge brainfart, that we were taking out for all purposes a post-9/11 reformed ally for a hope and a prayer. Worse, it turned the Arab Spring (partly spurred by Bradley Manning's doc dump showing the corruption of Arab governments) from peaceful civilian protest into supervised case-by-case military overthrow - a horrible bait-and switch and disturbing foreign policy precedent. Still, like with Syria and ISIS, it was an evolving no-easy-answers crisis. While I didn't expect Qaddafi to slaughter civilians, his statement that he would didn't help his case.

But the arena of snooping and surveillance is far from this urgency. After the Snowden leaks (I know, largely suspected, but still, he confirmed), the depth of government intrusion was out in the open. I don't think Hillary was nearly as caustic about Manning's leaks (despite others' wailing, no one's convincingly showed us Manning hurt us anywhere comparable to benefit). Clinton seemed to line up with the common contention that Snowden's merely a traitor.

Initially one might have thunk so. But the subsequent years of Congressional investigation, an oxymoron nicely covered by Marcie Wheeler, shows time and again our alphabet soup boys and girls playing shell games with the rules, and covering up gross incompetence and malicious intent with even broader requests for unneeded access. FBI can't share info properly with Homeland Security and CIA? Well let's just open up the databases to 5 million employees and contractors, no worries about misuse (cough). Huge NSA snooping stations in the desert don't even bother us even as they sort through Google search & location personal data and tons of live and stored telco call records. Congressional mandates on info privacy sit there unimplemented 10 years later, but we can scurry to implement some neat new shiny intrusion method quick-quick.

So now DoJ has come for Apple, pushing the limits of encryption and access yet again. Is this the breaking point for Hillary, where she "evolves" on privacy issues as the most snooped-on woman in the world, or is the same-oldsame-old, only bad people wanting to do us harm and only criminals have to worry about leaks and privacy and encryption.

The furor over Hillary's email server continually ignores the shit job that State and most other Gov branches do with cybersecurity. 3 months before 9/11, DoD servers got hit by malicious attacks - so they just took them offline. Did not bode well for a plan to protect civilian infrastructure or other government entities, and they've doubtfully caught up, putting their budgets into more easy intrusion capabilites than the harder problem of defense. Who has our data? We don't know, but seem lackadaisical and complacent about continual Russian and Chinese hacking as long as we're first on line to hack. Our joint Israeli-US Stuxnet virus to take out Iranian nuke facilities that then escaped into the wild is a case in point. It set a horrid precedent that the US was amoral or immoral about snooping, and we'd lead the way in backdoor intrusion.

So next to supermodels getting their nude selfies exposed en masse, we have another phone problem - not 1 as the FBI contends, but a classic setup of all phones that somehow need to be totally exploited and compromised for the FBI to do its job. And worse, the administration - more than enlisting telco support like in 2005, is demanding private companies actively assist it's snooping, work-for-hire.

So where does Hillary sit on this issue? Will she support Benghazi-like witch-hunts on every American and world citizen, or will she "evolve" and realize that every person in our ever-nosier techno "social" society needs some basic refuge of privacy, and that government rather than more keys needs to do a better, more competent job with the tools it has.

Hopefully, Hillary will sit under the Apple tree with all of us, avoiding the temptations of easy access and easily satiated curiosity, but aside from respecting her innate intelligence, and because of her innate conservatism on issues like medical marijuana, I've not a lot of reason to be optimistic.

Can she take this step on her own, withstand the whisperings of our security snakes and easy low-hanging fruit? They say the Apple doesn't fall far from the tree - will Hillary?