Tag Archives: law enforcement

SICARIO

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Emily Blunt is an FBI Agent who volunteers to join a task force to take down drug kingpins along the Mexican/United States border. Emily is initially portrayed as a seasoned agent, but the movie makes her a fun-loving, innocent, naive, stupid twit who is also vulnerable. If the task force does not do things following FBI protocols and methods, she is glum, disillusioned and uncooperative. This characterization makes Emily a mannequin for American purity and goodness. Benecio Del Toro informs her at the movie’s end (something the audience already knows): This is a country of wolves. You need to leave and go to a small town somewhere, not along the border.

Other than Emily’s weak character (which is played as written), Sicario is an excellent, violent, gritty film of the border law enforcement arising from drugs, crime and smuggling. Bencio Del Toro and Josh Brolin (balls to the wind) play the leads in the task force. If the scenes filmed have happened or may happen one day, Sicario is a deeply disturbing movie. [It was written and filmed during the Obama Administration; nothing Trump did helped produce or promote this movie.] Most Americans are not ready to face the reality – there will be actions and occurrences that must be overlooked.

Emily Blunt’s character should have been written differently. Allow her to learn from the experiences that character has in the movie. She does not like what the task force is doing; she makes mistakes. At the end she must have some fight (dignity, integrity and honesty) in her. In the confrontation Bencio Del Toro begins. She says, “I didn’t do very well.” He tells her she is too innocent and naive and he uses a line (carelessly disclosed earlier in the script) “You are too much like my daughter.” Emily already knows his daughter was killed by drug overlords. Del Toro gives his country of wolves comments. She is defiant. He says, “If you want to tell your FBI superiors about everything and about all your mistakes, it is up to you.” He leaves. Emily stews; she has decisions to make about the reality she has experienced and the reality Americans believe is true. In essence Emily can represent all Americans going forward.

U.S.A. 1 Apple 0

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Apple will lose its National Security lawsuit with the United States government. Apple is a corporation. Apple has software which is not protected by Constitutional provisions other than the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution (“the taking provision”). At best Apple can say it has trade secrets to protect.

To my delight and without my knowledge Apple discovers and fixes problems, issues and patches in its software. It gives away for free those updates. In order to make those improvements, Apple must enter a software program, change the code and test its compatibility with the remainder of the software, the apps and the machine itself. There is no backdoor created.

Complaining that Apple is being asked to write a backdoor key to enter an iPhone (and all the iPhones in the world) may not be a solid argument.

There is no right to privacy enumerated in the Constitution of the United States. It is inferred from the Fourth Amendment (Search & Seizure plus warrants). The Government has a warrant. The Fourth Amendment is satisfied. The Right to Privacy is certainly part of the Ninth Amendment, which neither courts want to cite nor humans want to ponder. So the Ninth Amendment has been forgotten.

In the Apple matter does the corporation have a right to assert a right to privacy for individuals who are dead, who committed murder, and who likely are aligned with terrorists, domestically and overseas? The right to privacy belongs to the two dead perpetrators. They are dead; they have no right to privacy. Can Apple resurrect their right to privacy to stop the government’s getting the information from the phone? Note that the information on the iPhone is owned by the perpetrators, not Apple.

One legal issue: Does Apple have standing to assert the right to privacy on behalf of the dead, especially in this case?

This case is a loser for Apple. I don’t know which set of attorneys (big fees, bad result) convinced Tim Cook to oppose. If the case goes forward, Apple and the whole software business will be saddled with a poor, unrepresentative legal precedent which will forever be like law enforcement that now obtains a warrant for a safety deposit box rented to a criminal, getting the key and retrieving the contents.