On Fiat-Chrysler’s Merger Proposal to Renault: Too Broad?

 As Renault was considering Fiat Chrysler’s proposal to merge, industry executives and analysts believed “that carmakers must link up to share the cost of a transition from internal combustion engines to avoid being run over by fast-moving tech industry challengers like Tesla or Uber.”[1] To be sure, (b)y purchasing parts together, combining their manufacturing operations and sharing the cost of research and development,” the merger could “eventually save 5 billion euros per year,” according to Fiat.[2] The R & D would include funds spent on developing new models as well as on high tech oriented to the future. Although significant efficiency could be achieved due to under-used factories and all the money going into product development, the basic problem was one of insufficient scale (i.e., revenue) to support (i.e., finance) the very costly research and development needed on electric and/or self-diving cars. In its statement, Fiat Chrysler pointed to “the need to take bold decisions to capture at scale the opportunities created by the transformation of the auto industry in areas like connectivity, electrification, and autonomous driving.”[3] The insufficient scale was particularly troubling given the declining E.U. auto market at a time when Tesla, Google and Uber were making progress on electric and self-driving cars. Fiat Chrysler could really use the expertise at Renault and Nissan on electric cars. I'm not sure, however, that a merger was the optimal route forward.

As with nearly everything, potential downsides existed. First, the merger would dilute the shares that the state of France already had in Renault from being its largest stockholder. Second, political leaders in that state as well as Italy would doubtless “fight to preserve as many jobs” in the respective states as possible.[4] In its analysis, however, The New York Times claimed at the time that it would be difficult for the merged company to avoid job cuts, given that the companies’ respective companies were operating below capacity.

So perhaps the anticipated savings of €5 million were optimistic, which raises the question: why not an alliance to fund a shared R&D center where work would be done on high cost, future revenue electrification and self-driving cars? Pushing for a full-blown merger would risk clashing corporate cultures. Also, the inevitable politics as duplicate management positions are eliminated would not be cost-free. Furthermore, the alliance between Renault and Nissan, already strained, could suffer or break apart in the event of a merger but not another alliance.

The basic problem was not enough scale (i.e., revenue) in either company to finance the heavy cost of R&D without compensating revenue in the short or medium term. When the gains from other efficiencies are not the main point of a merger, an alliance or partnership focused on the main problem may have been a better fit.

The problem of scale in terms of having enough money to finance the high-tech research need not incur the disproportional costs that come with increased organizational size and complexity. The costs of integration organizationally, for example, increase disproportionately with organizational size (and complexity).[5] Empire-building, a political as much as economic propensity at the upper level of organizations, can give rise to optimistic forecasts of savings from various efficiencies from mergers while the financial downsides are minimized. We could note, for example, the skepticism regarding Fiat Chrysler’s claim that no jobs would be lost and no factories would be closed. If the urgency for the merger was due to the advances by Tesla, etc., then perhaps a better proposal would have been delimited by that main problem rather than blown up to the form of a complete merger.

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[1] Jack Ewing et al, “Renault Considering Fiat’s Offer to Merge Into a New Auto Giant,” The New York Times, May 27, 2019

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] James D. Thompson, Organizations in Action: Social Science Bases of Administrative Theory (London: Routledge, 2003).

Oligarchic Social Media Companies: Willowing the Internet Unethically

Too much power in a few hands is inherently dangerous. That goes for private as well as public, or governmental, power. In the world of social media, the companies that own and control the platforms are essentially governmental in nature in that the executives promulgate rules and, ideally, see that they are enforced. The downsides to too few platforms—each with an extraordinary amount of power—involve a constricting of ideas, or content, on the internet, and potentially unanswered violations of the rights of the social-networks’ respective users. The public policy repercussions, I submit, include applying anti-trust law to social media companies such that none gets to become as massively dominating as Facebook had been allowed to become.

In an open letter in March, 2018, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, proposed a regulatory framework to balance the interests of the social media companies and their users. In the wake of the Facebook scandal then involving the psychological-political manipulation of up to 50 million users by a third party, Cambridge Analytica, the obvious inference was that privacy rights were in dire need of being shored up by regulators as Facebook’s management had failed even to notify the users of the invasive  use of their data. Yet a single-minded focus on that problem risks missing a more subtle one.

Berners-Lee points in his letter to the “concentration of power” in a few social media companies that “creates a new set of gatekeepers, allowing a handful of platforms to control which ideas and opinions are seen and shared.”[1] As a result, the “Web that many connected to years ago is not what new users will find today. What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms.”[2] The bloggers who can make good use of Facebook’s algorithm get to see their ideas (and blogs) popularized, whereas bloggers who eschew Facebook stand a greater chance of being relegated to a marginal position on the internet.

I am a case in point. I could have made use of Facebook for years to promote essays I have posted online, but I made a decision on principle not to use Facebook because of how that company had treated my attempts to create and use an account. On my first attempt, Facebook suspended my account because I had sent some text with a link to one of my academic articles to some scholars whom I actually knew. No one at Facebook bothered to ask me if my posts were spam. I was deemed to have sordid motives without much evidence to support the projection of distrust. I deleted the account. A few years later, I tried again. That time, Facebook demanded that I upload a clear facial picture of myself so I could be identified. Facebook had verified my phone number and email address, and thus my name, but strangely those were not enough. I had not yet even used the account and thus could not have violated any of the company’s use-policies, so the projection of distrust onto me was unacceptable to me. So I deleted that account rather than supply a picture of myself to be scanned. I was also concerned how the facial recognition software would be used, especially when combined with other basic information I had included in the profile. It turns out I had reason to be concerned, for even if my personality had not been construed and I had not been subject to political manipulation psychologically, the fact that Facebook failed to prevent the invasive actions by a political firm in 2015 means that other harvesting of data could have been going on without the users being informed. Even before that scandal broke, I did not trust Facebook’s staff.  

I suspect that the fact that I had written a booklet, Taking the Face off Facebook, had something to do with Facebook making it difficult for me to create and use an account. That the platform was at the time so huge means that keeping me off made it much more difficult for me to popularize my essays at The Worden Report. If so, Facebook was exploiting a conflict of interest by keeping off ideas critical of Facebook’s management. Although I made considerable use of LinkedIn and some use of Twitter, I felt as though I was swimming upstream in steering clear of Facebook as a possible means of publicizing my site. Even though business ethics was one of my areas of expertise, and thus of the essays on my site, I felt a strange feeling in actually making a stand ethically against my own use of Facebook even though I really could use the added publicity for my site.

A faculty member at the University of Chicago business school wrote me interestingly just after the Facebook scandal became public that if only I would get on Twitter and Facebook and attack the positions of other people, my essays would be picked up by the major media and I would no longer be making things harder on myself than need be. If only I “attack people.” Really? The University of Chicago must be quite a place! Another ethical line in the sand that I would not cross. Years earlier, I had stopped attending the Academy of Management “academic” conferences because the “scholars” had made a “blood sport” out of tearing apart scholars giving paper-presentations. I found that I could be helpful to the presenters by instead suggesting fruitful directions rather than trashing what had already been written. Any dead wood would eventually fall off from the tree anyway, whereas a useful insight would be sited and thus popularized. I had the same philosophy about my essays, sans any “facilitator” like Facebook. I suspect that Facebook’s culture might have been allowed to become akin to that of the Academy of Management. If so, vindictiveness could be added as a reason why the range of ideas on the internet has been narrowed, and why more attention was not devoted to enforcing policies on the third-party uses of user data. With great power comes great responsibility, so does the power remain when it has become clear that the responsibility has been lacking?

In short, social media companies like Google and Facebook had been allowed by the U.S. Government, and ultimately the American people, to get too big—too much coverage and control of the internet. There should have been another platform similar to Facebook’s that I could have used to reach more readers. Heather West of Mozilla stated at the SXSW conference in 2018 that people were “realizing the power that technology has in our lives and [were] asking technology companies to be more transparent and responsible.”[3] I doubt that, and, besides, I submit that something more than asking was needed. Social media companies like Facebook were clinging at the time to their mantra that they merely provide platforms rather than the content (or even curating it). That is similar to Goldman Sachs insisting in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 that the bank merely puts markets together, rather than acts also as a proprietary player in them. At the SXSW conference, Kara Swisher of Vox Media and Christiane Amanpour of CNN mocked Twitter and Facebook for insisting, “We’re a tech platform that facilitates media.”[4] A conflict of interest is in even just that, for which media is to be facilitated and which relegated as problematic? Clearly, fake political ads are problematic, but are the social critics whose range includes critiquing social media companies also problematic? Perhaps Facebook’s actual role is a blend of public and private—a private sector government, one might say. If so, democratic accountability, and even that by stockholders, is problematic and thus not to be relied on.

The answer is more government regulation of companies like Facebook, essentially meaning that the public governance functions of Facebook should be overseen at the very least by public policy rather than corporate governance and pressure from users. But government regulation has its limits. Regulators cannot be everywhere, and they cannot get at the problem of the willowing of the blogs on the internet due to factors controlled by the social media companies. For there to be a true democracy of ideas on the World Wide Web, alternative platforms of substantial but not dominating scale  must be viable without being snuffed out by a bloated platform like Facebook’s. Breaking up that company could mean that potential upstarts would get a chance to grow without being bought out and shelved by the giant. Oligopoly is not good for competition, and whether or not an industry is permitted to attain an oligarchic structure is a matter for governments to decide, and ultimately electorates.

For more on this topic, 

See the essay, "Facebook: A Distrustful Company."

See also the booklet, Taking the Face off Facebook

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[1] Rob Pegoraro, “SXSW Takes a Skeptical Look at Tech,” USA Today, March 13, 2018.

[2] Ibid.

[3]Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

Bringing Back Manufacturing Jobs to the U.S.A.: Confronting Tough Realities

Meeting with American corporate CEOs at the White House on the first “working day” of his presidency, Donald Trump warned, “A company that wants to fire all of its people in the United States and build some factory somewhere else, then thinks that product is going to just flow across the border into the United States . . . that’s just not going to happen.”[1] The new president was up against “tectonic forces” in trying to bring back “blue collar” manufacturing jobs to his base using tax policy. Yet the business calculus goes immediately on the basis of financial advantage, and the contours of the “game board” include the various tax and trade policies of countries.

Without an import tax of sufficient amount to render the cost savings of moving a factory abroad, CEOs will naturally succumb to the pressure “to increase earnings at a double-digit rate when the American economy is growing by only 2 percent, and the quickest way to deliver higher profits is by reducing labor costs, whether through automation or moving jobs to cheaper locales like Mexico or China.”[2] The push, in other words, is excessive. The cause, according to the New York Times, “is the drive for bigger returns on 401(k) accounts, pension plans and other retirement vehicles that depend on steadily rising corporate profits and, in turn, a buoyant stock market.”[3] Whereas a U.S. president has a term of four years in which to see his policies realized, no such time-span is permitted where quarterly earnings reports are all the rage. Simply put, CEOs must make sure their policies see results and quick. With many emerging-market economies, as well as China, growing at more than twice the rate of the U.S. at the time Trump took office, global—including American—capital takes flight.

It is not as though the CEO’s of American companies who move factories off-shore are unethical. Scott Paul of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, told the New York Times, “I believe a lot of the C.E.O.s in that room [with Trump] want to do the right thing and create jobs in America, but the realities of Wall Street Pressure and a globalized economy leads [those C.E.O.s] to off-shore a lot of these jobs.”[4] One way to align the patriotic value with the business calculus is to alter the “game board” in such a way that it would be cheaper for the companies to manufacture products geared for domestic sale domestically rather than abroad; products directed to the Chinese consumer could still be manufactured in China. The key lies in raising the tariff or tax high enough and in adequately enforcing it. 

To be sure, automation would still mean that a return to the manufacturing hay-days could not be expected. Herein lies a much more difficult challenge: what to do with the remaining blue-collar workers who are not oriented to moving to white-collar professions and yet cannot find jobs in manufacturing. Behind the legitimacy of a tax on American companies moving factories abroad is the hard truth that significant numbers of people in any geographical region are not going to fit into white-collar jobs, for a variety of reasons not limited to education and upbringing as well as values.

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[1] Nelson D. Schwartz and Alan Rappeport, “Call to Create Jobs, or Else, Tests Trump’s Sway,” The New York Times, January 24, 2017.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

AT&T Buys Time Warner: An Expansive Strategy Amid Industry Uncertainty

After Comcast’s $30 billion takeover of NBCUniversal and Verizon’s acquisitions of the Huffington Post and Yahoo, AT&T agreed on October 22, 2016 to buy Time Warner for $85.4 billion. The ability to produce content and deliver it to millions of viewers “with wireless phones, broadband subscriptions and satellite TV connections was not lost on either board.[i] At the time, AT&T sold “wireless service in a saturated market, while Time Warner [was] a content company whose primary assets, networks like CNN and HBO, [faced] tougher times in a cord-cutting world.”[ii] Although AT&T’s board could be accused of empire-building, the stabilizing impact of combining wireless service and content could hardly be ignored in a business-environment so full of change and uncertainty. In other words, with the traditional television industry facing such dire threats to its revenue-structure due to the proliferation of high-tech substitutes, having the wherewithal to formulate and experiment with different distribution means and even content was at the time a fitting strategy.

Due to the internet and the smartphone, the way people paid for TV, the kinds of programming, and the devices to watch it on were “all undergoing transformational change.”[iii] Accordingly, consumer behavior was “neither settled nor predictable.”[iv] One thing was clear: the ability to avoid having to watch commercials was something that viewers prized, and this meant that the traditional television industry would very likely be transformed. “I think we’re all trying to figure this out — how technology and the consumer is going to change, and who are the winners and losers in this future,” said Walter Piecyk, who studies the telecommunications industry at the research firm BTIG. The best argument for the merger, he said, is that AT&T would be diversified in that the company would have both programming content and distribution channels, rather than just one or the other. When you face an uncertain future, diversity can be an asset. “If it turns out that in the future, content becomes more valuable than distribution, the new AT&T will have that; if the opposite happens, it’s covered there, too.”[v]

Randall Stephenson and Jeffrey Bewkes, the chairmen and chief executives of AT&T and Time Warner, argued, “the future of TV will depend on a lot of new ideas that are tested and deployed very quickly. These might include new business models for paying for shows, new ways to distribute and market that content, and new technologies and industrywide standards to make sure it all works.”[vi] Analysts, however, said a lot of these potential products and services could be created from licensing deals. A merger might actually slow down industrywide collaborations, they argued, because it sets up a new giant that others in the industry may not want to work with. “This appears to be about empire sustenance rather than economic efficiency,” said Brian Wieser, an analyst at the Pivotal Research Group.

Expanding a business empire is never without its ethical challenges, not to mention the possible economic hit on market-competition. In the case of the media, a lot of power in a few hands also presents political risks to democracy, especially when the electorate relies on the media for information concerning candidates and policy. In the case of the United States, where the First Amendment of the federal constitution protects media, giving such license to a few rather than many can result in distortions within the democracy. Not only could the few who control the "public airwaves" (an antiquated expression) influence elections and public policy; interlocking corporate board memberships could make it easy for the few private companies that control the media to act in the interest of corporations in other sectors at the expense of the public good. Rather than taking on these "macro" issues here, I want to suggest how the combined merger in this case can be optimized from a business standpoint. 

Moving to the company-level, a possible conflict of interest is involved in this particular merger. Specifically, would AT&T give priority in its distribution channels to its own content from Time Warner? Also, would AT&T restrict Time Warner’s content to the company’s distribution channels? It would not make sense economically “for Time Warner to offer most of its content exclusively to AT&T’s customers. Not only would that destroy its profitability (Comcast’s customers pay a lot for CNN and HBO, so why would Time Warner want to kill that business?), but it would also be out of step with the future. The notion of content tied to specific distribution lines is exactly what consumers [were] moving away from when they [chose] services like Netflix over cable bundles.”[vii] Clearly, maximizing both the types of distribution and the content would be in the combined company’s best interest, especially considering the tremendous uncertainty playing out in the industry after decades of traditional radio and television. 

So in this case, enlightened self-interest can obviate the conflict of interest that is inherent in having content and distribution channels that show others' content as well. Having the wherewithal to put large sums of money into research and development in new means of distribution and how they would impact the type of content is perhaps the foremost strategic advantage in the merger. With the industry changing so much and so quickly, at least as of the time of the merger, being and staying on the forefront both technologically and in terms of content is a prime advantage of this gigantic merger. 

The strategic standpoint at the company- and industry-level is of course not the whole story, particularly as the industry includes the media, which is very important especially in a large republic such as the United States. Weighing the strategic benefit to the firm and industry from the merger against possible costs including not only political ones, but also economic as well (i.e., diminished competition) is especially difficult because different levels are involved (i.e., society, industry, and company), and analysts reside at these various levels. A CEO talking about the case with a U.S. Senator, for instance, will face the problem of talking from one level to another (i.e., company to societal). Ideally, societal actors can work to create and sustain competitive industries and a free and open media, while CEOs still have enough space to situate their respective firms as best as possible strategically. The present case is interesting because the merger has the potential to facilitate the transformation of how content is delivered due to the combined financial wherewithal even as there are major ethical, economic, and political risks or downsides.

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[i] Michael J. de la Merced, “AT&T Pledges $85 Billion To Acquire Time Warner,” The New York Times, October 23, 2016.

[ii] Farhad Manjoo, “AT&T-Time Warner Deal Is a Strike in the Dark,” The New York Times, October 24, 2016.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Ibid.

Apple’s iPhone and the FBI: Recalibrating the Right-to-Privacy

On February 29, 2016, a federal judge rejected the FBI’s request to unlock the work-issued iPhone 5c of Syed Rizwan Farook, who with his wife killed 14 people at a 2015 holiday gathering of county workers. The FBI and DEA cited the All Writs Act, a law passed in 1789 that authorizes federal courts to “issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.”[1] The U.S. Justice Department was demanding that “Apple create software to bypass security features on the phone.”[2] In other words, Apple was to “write code that overrides the device’s auto-delete security function.”[3] In response, Apple’s lawyers argued that the statute does not give the court the right to “conscript and commandeer” the company into defeating its own encryption, thus making its customers’ “most confidential and personal information vulnerable to hackers, identity thieves, hostile foreign agents and unwarranted government surveillance.”[4] Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO at the time, said the FBI “was asking his company to create a ’back door’ that could be used to unlock other phones, exposing customer data. Agreeing to the FBI's demand would set a dangerous precedent that could lead to other calls for Apple's help to obtain private information, Cook said.”[5] Only weeks later, the FBI abruptly dropped the case because the bureau had found an outside company with technology that could serve as a master key. The FBI could use the “key” to unlock any iPhone. This left customers fearful that their data was now less than private even though Apple had promoted the iPhone product as not having a “back door” In the end, “(t)he iPhone fight exposed a rift between the FBI and Silicon Valley technology companies over encryption, and sparked a debate about the right balance between privacy and national security.”[6] I suspect that although a trade-off, or tension between the right of privacy and the national-security interest of the United States existed at the time, electronic privacy would become harder and harder to protect as a result of the FBI’s tactics.  

No doubt focused entirely on national security, the U.S. government cannot be expected to protect an individual right to privacy when it is in the way. The FBI “sometimes loses sight of what is important to corporations . . .  and privacy is incredibly important," Jack Bennett, a key figure in the FBI’s iPhone hack, said after the fact.[7] Even so, he was unapologetic about the FBI being able to access the phone. “We were trying to get on one phone because we had 14 murdered people."[8] As it turned out, investigators did not find anything of significant value on the phone.[9] Even so, the damage was done as far as privacy is concerned.

Even though Bennett “disputed that the FBI was asking Apple for a tool that could access other iPhones, calling it a ‘one-shot deal,’”[10] the bureau could be expected to extend the one-shot deal the next time phone data might serve a useful purpose in preventing or prosecuting a terrorist-attack or even a lesser crime. "What's comfortable for a private corporation that will still provide an investigator the ability to stop or prevent a terrorist attack, a missing child or a national security incident?" Bennett asked.[11] The list could easily be extended; hence, some legal limitation on the FBI’s access would be necessary lest the bureau resort to clandestine data-swooping on a massive scale not limited to particular crimes and people related to them in some way.

Apple’s iPhone was supposed to be hack-proof; the company promoted the product as not having a “back door.” Even so, this turned out not to be so. It may be, therefore, that there’s no such thing as a completely secure system. Privacy may simply be an illusion marketed by the company and valued by the customers. Customers of any smart phone could feel vulnerable, moreover, as a result of the FBI successfully getting into the iPhone.[12]

Furthermore, a court can put a gag rule on a tech company, such that customers may be oblivious to any personal data being extracted. This only exacerbates the insecurity to be felt by customers regarding the privacy of their information. Microsoft had sued the Justice Department over the gag-order practice in April, 2016, “arguing that law enforcement was relying on these orders too often. Specifically, the software giant said the gag orders violate the Fourth Amendment right of its customers to know if the government searches or seizes their property and also the company’s First Amendment right to speak to its customers.”[13] Yet the gag orders could continue. To be sure, a company’s First Amendment right seems a bit of a stretch here.

Lastly, the FBI could be expected to continue to go wherever private data useful in uncovering a crime exists. For example, Open Whisper Systems, a maker of a widely used encryption app called Signal, received a subpoena in the first half of 2016 “for subscriber information, including web browsing histories, telephone numbers, methods of payment, internet providers, and data stored in the tracking “cookies” of the web browsers associated with two phone numbers that came up in a federal grand jury investigation in Virginia.[14]  Interestingly, “one of Signal’s biggest draws is that it does not collect most of that information.”[15] Civil liberties lawyers argued nevertheless that “the Justice Department request fell well outside the bounds of what is typically covered by a subpoena, including basic subscriber information.”[16] Particularly upsetting, the subpoena arrived with a court order that said Open Whisper Systems was not allowed to tell anyone about the information request for one year. Technology companies contend that court-imposed gag orders are being used too often by law enforcement and that they violate the Bill of Rights. The companies also complain that law enforcement officials are casting a wide net over online communications — often too wide — in their investigations. Justice Department officials, for their part, argue that these gag orders are necessary to protect developing cases and to avoid tipping off potential targets. The officials say that they are simply following leads where they take them.”[17]

In conclusion, even wealthy companies like Apple are no match for the FBI and the courts in protecting customer privacy. Just as companies pursue profits often single-mindedly, the FBI can be expected to attempt to uncover any lead. Furthermore, the electronic means of storing personal information may simply be too susceptible—too easily accessed by a government (and hackers)—for privacy to be at all realistic. Smartphone technology, as well as social media such as Facebook pages, is causing us all to come to terms with a recalibrated acceptance of privacy-risk and even loss. It is asking too much, I submit, for a company to be tasked with defending an increasingly antiquated expectation of privacy. As a result, we might expect people to recalibrate what personal information we are willing to put on a phone (or social-media page). The Apple case can be interpreted as one of the triggers of the societal recalibration, rather than settling the matter.

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1. Jim Stavridis and Dave Weinstein, “Apple vs. FBI Is Not About Privacy vs. Security—It’s About How to Achieve Both,” The World Post, March 8, 2016.

2. The Associated Press, “New FBI Head in San Francisco Was Key Figure in iPhone Hack,” The New York Times, October 5, 2016.

3. Jim Stavridis and Dave Weinstein, “Apple vs. FBI Is Not About Privacy vs. Security—It’s About How to Achieve Both,” The World Post, March 8, 2016.

4. Jim Stavridis and Dave Weinstein, “Apple vs. FBI Is Not About Privacy vs. Security—It’s About How to Achieve Both,” The World Post, March 8, 2016.

5. The Associated Press, “New FBI Head in San Francisco Was Key Figure in iPhone Hack,” The New York Times, October 5, 2016.

6. The Associated Press, “New FBI Head in San Francisco Was Key Figure in iPhone Hack,” The New York Times, October 5, 2016.

7. The Associated Press, “New FBI Head in San Francisco Was Key Figure in iPhone Hack,” The New York Times, October 5, 2016.

8. The Associated Press, “New FBI Head in San Francisco Was Key Figure in iPhone Hack,” The New York Times, October 5, 2016.

9. The Associated Press, “New FBI Head in San Francisco Was Key Figure in iPhone Hack,” The New York Times, October 5, 2016.

10. The Associated Press, “New FBI Head in San Francisco Was Key Figure in iPhone Hack,” The New York Times, October 5, 2016.

11. The Associated Press, “New FBI Head in San Francisco Was Key Figure in iPhone Hack,” The New York Times, October 5, 2016.

12. Arjun Kharpal, “Apple vs FBI: All You Need to Know,” CNBC.com, March 29, 2016.

13. Nicole Perlroth and Katie Benner, “Subpoenas and Gag Orders Show Government Overreach, Tech Companies Argue,” The New York Times, October 4, 2016.

14. Nicole Perlroth and Katie Benner, “Subpoenas and Gag Orders Show Government Overreach, Tech Companies Argue,” The New York Times, October 4, 2016.

15. Nicole Perlroth and Katie Benner, “Subpoenas and Gag Orders Show Government Overreach, Tech Companies Argue,” The New York Times, October 4, 2016.

16. Nicole Perlroth and Katie Benner, “Subpoenas and Gag Orders Show Government Overreach, Tech Companies Argue,” The New York Times, October 4, 2016.

17. Nicole Perlroth and Katie Benner, “Subpoenas and Gag Orders Show Government Overreach, Tech Companies Argue,” The New York Times, October 4, 2016.