The DOJ Puts Apple's iMessage Encryption in the Antitrust Crosshairs | How America Stopped Trusting the Experts | Senate Unveils “Compromise” FISA Reauthorization Bill, and more

With the introduction of the SAFE Act, Durbin and Lee have reinserted the Senate into the public debate on Section 702 reauthorization. The Senate was the first chamber to move ahead on reauthorization last year. In November, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Vice Chairman Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Sens. Lee and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) introduced competing reauthorization bills that revealed the wide congressional gulf on how to reform Section 702. But the Senate then assumed a backseat role, as the conversation shifted to the House of Representatives. Since December, the House has found little success reconciling internecine disagreements among House Republicans that have forced House Speaker Mike Johnson to postpone floor action on multiple reauthorization proposals, including a compromise bill that faced a rapid rise and fall just over a month ago. 
The centerpiece of the SAFE Act is its provision of a middle ground on the warrant requirement. Under current law, the U.S. government may run queries of Section 702 information using U.S. person search terms and access the results without prior approval from a court. Up to this point, the warrant requirement debate has occurred along the lines of whether or not to require a court order before running any U.S. person query. The authority to run a query without prior court approval would remain unchanged under the SAFE Act. But the bill would require the government to obtain a probable cause criminal warrant or a traditional FISA court order before accessing the results of that query, that is, any communications content. The bill incorporates some exceptions to this requirement, such as for emergency situations, when the queried U.S. person provides consent, or for queries designed to identify targets of cyberattacks.

How Trump Valet’s Testimony Supports DOJ’s January 6th Case  (Tom Joscelyn, Just Security)
The New York Times has published a heavily redacted transcript of an interview with former President Donald Trump’s White House valet conducted by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Times received a copy of the transcript from House Republicans. For more than a year, Congressman Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) and his team have desperately searched for a way to undermine the credibility of the January 6th Committee, which disbanded in January 2023. Those efforts have failed.
Loudermilk has falsely claimed the January 6th Committee hid evidence that would somehow absolve Trump of his responsibility for the attack on the Capitol. To set the record straight: the transcript of the valet’s testimony was not hidden by the committee – it was kept by the White House, which has legitimate security concerns. As the Times reports, “some of the committee’s transcripts were subject to confidentiality agreements, and those were sent to the White House and Secret Service for review and redactions before they could be released.” Indeed, at the end of the transcript, the valet explained he had “anxiety” about testifying. The January 6th Committee took these concerns into account, stating in its final report that it was “not revealing the identity of this witness to guard against the risk of retaliation.”
Moreover, nothing in the transcript is exculpatory for Trump. Loudermilk himself concedes that “some testimony in it that may not be favorable to Trump.”

How America Stopped Trusting the Experts  (Isabel Fattal, The Atlantic)
It’s almost a cliché to haul off easy answers and say “Vietnam and Watergate,” but even clichés contain some truth. It really is the case that the crisis of expertise began in the early 1970s, for several reasons. The misconduct of a president and several executive-branch agencies produced a feeling that U.S. institutions were no longer led by wise people. And a war that we couldn’t seem to win had a profound effect on trust and social cohesion.
But the ’70s were also the Me Decade. People looked inward after all the turmoil of the previous decade, and they decided to seek answers to a lot of things on their own. It’s not a coincidence that the ’70s were the heyday of cults and fads and quack remedies and “ancient astronauts.” This is when anti-vaccine movements started to pop up. We think we have it bad now, but go look up Laetrile and pyramid power to see what things were like 40 or 50 years ago.
The problem, of course, is that the Me Decade never really ended, so here we are.

The DOJ Puts Apple’s iMessage Encryption in the Antitrust Crosshairs  (Andy Greenberg, Andrew Couts, Wired)
For well over a decade, Apple has been praised by privacy advocates for its decision in 2011 to end-to-end encrypt iMessage, securing users’ communications on the default texting app for all its devices so thoroughly that even Apple itself can’t read their messages. This was years before WhatsApp switched on end-to-end encryption in 2016, and before Signal—now widely considered the most private end-to-end encrypted messaging platform—even existed, Apple quietly led the way with that security feature, baking it into a core piece of the Apple ecosystem.
So it’s ironic that as US Department of Justice hits Apple with a landmark antitrust lawsuit, alleging that it has sought for years to monopolize the smartphone market and gravely harmed consumers in the process, iMessage’s end-to-end encryption has now become Exhibit A for an argument about Apple’s privacy hypocrisy—that Apple’s allegedly anticompetitive practices have denied users not only better prices, features, and innovation, but also better digital security.
In its sweeping antitrust lawsuit, the DOJ on Thursday laid out a broad set of allegations against Apple, accusing it of monopolistic practices in how it uses its walled-garden operating systems and app stores to deprive consumers of apps and services that might make it easier for them to wean themselves from their Apple addictions—keeping out of the App Store so-called super apps with cross-platform, broad functionality; limiting streaming and cloud-based applications; and handicapping the functionality of competitors’ devices like smartwatches.