My intention in drawing attention to critical application development is an attempt to deepen the discussion around 'apps' and rhetoric. In the discussions around app usage in the democratic primaries, the target appears to be the vulnerability which exists today because programmers today are a bunch of python hacks who never read Knuth. Yet, not a single Friam mother-church meeting passes without a discussion of the precision engineering embodied in our Porches, Teslas, or iphones.
Of particular interest to me in directing this rhetorical frame are the so-called-on-wikipedia FBI-Apple encryption dispute <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93Apple_encryption_dispute> and the Target corp data breach <https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.04940.pdf> of 2013. In the first case, the federal government is confronted by the reality that a phone manufacturer *can* in fact make cryptographically challenging hand held devices. Further we can use this powerful technology for sending our family cat pictures which arrive at their target destinations almost without fail and near instantaneously. There is a sense of *justified* *indignation* when the cat photo takes more than a second to be delivered. The state-of-the-art is such that we *can* have nice things. In the second case, a data breach is exploited in the POS system of big box corporation which sells mostly useless things. Next, a public rhetoric emerges similar to the rhetoric I am witnessing here with the democratic primaries. Instead of pointing out that Target corp doesn't consider our privacy a critical concern, we speak of how impossible it is to have privacy and how vulnerable we feel because Target corp is a critical institution. Jon
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