The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal’s “Best of the Web” at The Wall Street Journal written by the editor, James Taranto.
What Would We Do Without Experts?
“Is Nursing a STEM Field? Experts Disagree”—headline, Forbes, March 29
Take a Number
“Fidel Castro Was Not Impressed With Obama”—headline, New York Post, March 28
Bottom Story of the Day
“Hillary Clinton Attacks G.O.P. for Not Acting on Obama’s Supreme Court Pick”—headline, New York Times, March 29
Bad Apple
“The government officially withdrew from its battle against Apple Monday,” USA Today reports:
The Justice Department withdrew its legal action against Apple after a method brought to the FBI earlier this month by an unidentified entity allowed investigators to crack the security function without erasing contents of the iPhone used by Syed Farook, who with his wife, Tashfeen Malik, carried out the December mass shooting in San Bernardino that left 14 dead.
The government maintained it was looking for access to one phone, but Apple countered that asking for a code that could access the iPhone 5c would create a backdoor to all such devices that was exploitable by other entities.
“This case should never have been brought,” Apple said in a statement released late Monday. “We will continue to help law enforcement with their investigations, as we have done all along, and we will continue to increase the security of our products as the threats and attacks on our data become more frequent and more sophisticated. . . . This case raised issues which deserve a national conversation about our civil liberties, and our collective security and privacy.”
We think Apple should have complied with the government’s request. We’re also glad we don’t have an iPhone, seeing as how the government can break into them at will.
For more “Best of the Web” from The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto click here.
