There has been a lot of debate concerning what should be done with the iPhone that Syed Farook was using prior to his death. Gizmodo says that the phone belonged to, and therefore was presumably paid for, by his government employer. That raises the following stupid question: Why did Mr. Farook need a taxpayer-funded iPhone? The government is interested in whether this U.S. citizen used it to support waging Jihad along with Green Card-holding Tashfeen Malik, but today I’m wondering about the non-Jihad aspect of the case. Why would the taxpayers have bought him an iPhone for $600 or $1000? What job function did it serve? (And why wouldn’t a recently bankrupt city have purchased a cheaper Android device or, like some private employers, paid Farook a small amount to use his own phone? (As with everything else relating to employment in the U.S., such a policy can lead to litigation.))
11 thoughts on “Dumb Syed Farook Question: Why did he need a taxpayer-funded iPhone?”
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I didn’t know the government gave the guy his phone. This actually supports the conspiracy theories that have been created by the incident.
I have worked for the federal government. At least with the federal government, they never use Apple products, period. They also never hand out smart phones to low level employees. If you are sufficiently high level, you might get a Wintel compatible phone that usually doesn’t work. Everything you do on it will be monitored, which means no need to go back to the company to find out what you did with it, and of course the monitoring plus the fact that it usually doesn’t work, plus the fact that you could be fired for it, discourages use of the thing for personal projects.
Now local governments such as San Bernardino may well be different, but I though they were hard up for cash.
Why was the county paying this kid $80k a year, or whatever the salary was? It appears that California spends way too much money.
Ed is “spot on” about the federal government. You have to be fairly high up to be provided a phone of any sort – and the Feds usually avoid Apple due to the cost. If you are able to get a phone it is a BlackBerry and all communications flow through the Government server (except for someone like Hillary, but don’t get me started about that). Most of us just used our own person phones for voice communication (no compensation for that though), but we were not allowed to link our personal cell phones to our official e-mail accounts.
The Wikipedia page that you link to indicates that Mr. Farook’s job probably included a fair amount of travel around the county. The iPhone was probably purchased to allow him to communicate easily with colleagues. Also, it’s quite possible that the county or the state has a contract with Apple or a telecommunications provider which provides the devices at a cost lower than the amount an individual would pay at his local Apple store.
Philip’s brother-in-law has worked for the federal govt off & on for years, and only once was he given a government-paid cell phone, and it was a Blackberry (circa 2008). We know folks who work at Homeland Security, but again they’re issued Blackberry or Android products, not iPhones.
This has been a pet peeve of mine for a while, ever since Philip’s nephew came home from a presentation by A Wider Circle, a “non-profit” founded by a lawyer turned activist who draws a handsome salary for finding furniture and work clothes for the destitute (great cause, but just questioning his renumeration for chucking his career as a lawyer of his own volition). Then-11 yo noticed that all the Wider Circle admins had the latest iPhone. My son actually asked one of them whether that’s her personal phone (at the time, he was quite curious about iPhones as only his software engineer older brother possessed one, and lived across the country), and she responded, “We are given them by A Wider Circle.” Disturbing that the local CA govt had similar largesse to a DC area “non-profit.”
Google says he was employed as a health inspector, and visited 42 schools 69 times total since 2012 – so a mobile phone is perfectly reasonable for that role.
Apple vs Android? I’d venture a guess that, as an inspector, his phone was running a custom app developed for his job – so again the expense is perfectly reasonable.
What @Al said. I can imagine that for such a role, a device with an integrated camera is a reasonable expense.
Love how super-smart you commenters are! However, do you think the employees of A Wider Circle needs iPhones? To take higher resolution pictures of used furniture?
It was an iPhone 5C. They were always the lower cost model, and depending on when it was issued, might have been free with contract.
It’s a reasonable requisition anyway: product lasts longer than similarly-priced Android models, gets security updates unlike all but the most expensive Android models, and has resale value at the end of the lease. Also, many employees prefer iPhones, and the cost difference is little enough that it’s smart to prioritize employee happiness, sometimes.
Not the mass murderer hates-our-way-of-living terrorist employees, of course. Just the uncrazy ones.
It is not the cost of the phone, it is the cost of the plan.
Cell phones and cell phone plans are designed by the same geniuses who design the experience at casinos and who design the pricing of health care services and health care plans. It is all about using every trick possible to get you to spend more than you would spend if you were thinking rationally.
Cell phones could be a good theory for why everybody in America is pissed.
I mean, young people have no possibility of owning a house or a car or paying off student loans because their phone bill is the size of a car or mortgage payment.
Old people find the cell phone eats up their whole social security check and they never funded their 401K or IRA because they were spending it all on their cell phone.
Those old people would be happy to have a landline but the phone company can’t bear the thought you could have a $30 a month landline when you could be spending $300 on a phone and plans. They can’t bear the thought that you could have DSL or cable or optic fiber that doesn’t cost $10 a Gigabyte. They say they are “technology agnostic” but they really mean you can’t afford to use an operating system which comes with security updates.
Maybe the reason for sluggish economic growth is that salespeople are talking all day into cell phones and getting disconnected 4 times in every call and even when you are “connected” it sounds like they are sitting on a toilet and flushing it continously. So obviously they don’t sell anything.
For a while in my town you had to go to the ghetto to get to the independent cell phone store to get a prepaid phone that works for the Verizon network, The place was always empty except for an occasional technically savvy or affluent person who would come in — people who are affluent because they didn’t spend it all on cell phones and plans.
The ghetto people would drive out to the mall and wait in line 3 hours and spend another hour activating it at the fake Verizon store at the mall. Now it is just Chinese students and hillbillies at the mall because they built a real Verizon store across the street from the ghetto and to their credit, the people at the Verizon store know how to activate a phone and won’t treat you like scum because you are “only” making a $100 purchase to fill your prepaid for a year.
Cell phones have destroyed the market for any other kind of electronic device that isn’t part of a military weapon system, and have devastated the software industry. Back in the day you could a make a game for the XBox, price it at $50 and produce a huge amount of art, writing, voices, 3d models, level design and it might actually be fun. Now Intel cuts back the I/O bandwidth of new chips because they don’t want you to have a discrete graphics card because the only game you need to play is Farmville or some other game that is not any fun but somebody makes you feel obligated to play it and harass your friends to play it, and now you don’t have any friends but you don’t realize it because you are checking Facebook every 10 seconds.
The worst thing is that cell phones create false consciousness so that you never realize it is cell phones causing all the problems. Down in Arizona they think they are pissed at Mexicans rather than pissed at the phone company, so don’t take your Tracfone there because good Americans spend $2000 a year on their cell phone plans so there is no way they will let you get on the network with an affordable Mexican phone that has customer service ratings dramatically better than any of the postpaid phone companies.
In some country like Singapore they would show some leadership and realize cell phones are a scourge like chewing gum and ban them. Maybe Trump is smart enough to realize this.
@Paul Houle: The ghetto people would drive out to the mall and wait in line 3 hours and spend another hour activating it at the fake Verizon store at the mall.
The federal government issues free cell service and “obamaphones” to vagrants and low-income people.
For the past several years, I’ve used a $25/mo unlimited talk + text MetroPCS cell phone plan using a non-SmartPhone. I haven’t had a hardline home phone for fifteen years.
My City employs 1000 City workers an issues City-funded SmartPhones to over 500 workers, including every police officer. At about $65 per month per user, that’s about $400K per year, before hardware costs.