On March 27, CNN reports, US president Donald Trump left the White House for a day at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia, his 13th trip to one of the numerous golf courses he owns. The implication of the media’s mild obsession with his trips is that Trump is wasting time playing cow pasture pool when he should be attending to the duties of his office.

Former president Barack Obama came in for similar criticism from Republicans — including Donald Trump — over the 333 rounds of golf he played as president according to Golf News Net. That averages 41 outings per year, or one every nine days.

Personally, I don’t see the problem. I wish Obama had played more golf, and I’d be happy to see Trump spend seven days a week on the links.

The opposition ruthlessly criticizes every president’s work — every bill, every executive order, every policy proposal, every public gaffe. The harder the president works, the more they complain.

But then that same opposition cries foul when the president stops doing all that bad and stupid stuff and takes a break to spend time knocking a little white  ball around a field, trying to make it roll into a little a hole in the ground.

Make up your minds, folks. If you don’t like the things the president does when he’s working, why complain that he doesn’t work enough?

Speaking of which, many of the critics of presidential time off are members of Congress, who are paid $174,000 per year (more if they are in leadership positions) and get more days off (230 or so) than they work (130 or so). How’s that for standing to critique someone else’s work ethic?

In the meantime, if you’re an average American who gets weekends and federal holidays off and two weeks of vacation, you’re working 240 days a year. About 80 of those work days aren’t for yourself or your family, but to earn the taxes that Congress and the president blow through like drunken sailors, on stuff more expensive and pointless than greens fees.

The question isn’t really whether American politicians should be working more or harder. The question is, how can we get them to work less?

As 19th century jurist Gideon J. Tucker wrote, “no man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.” Or when the president is in residence at the White House. Let the man enjoy his golf.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION  HISTORY

• “Presidential golf breaks: Good for America,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Winchester, Tennessee Herald Chronicle, 03/28/17
• “Presidential Golf Breaks: Good For America,” by Thomas L. Knapp, CounterPunch, 03/29/17
• “Presidential golf breaks: Good for america,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Greenville, South Carolina Daily Reflector, 03/29/17
• “Presidential Golf Breaks: Good For America,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 03/30/17
• “Daily Mail editorial: Presidential golf good for the US?” by staff, Charleston, West Virginia Gazette-Mail, 03/31/17
• “Keep presidents on (the) course,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Suncoast News [Florida], 04/11/17
• “Presidential golf breaks are good for America,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Pickens, South Carolina Sentinel, 04/02/17

UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd is upset. She considers it “unacceptable” that she can’t read your private chat messages and wants that fixed.  Naturally, she publicly ties her demand that you surrender your privacy to  the fight against terrorism.  Fortunately, Rudd won’t get her way. That’s not because her demand is evil and wrong-headed, although it is. It’s because her demand is impossible to implement.

British police and intelligence agencies want to read WhatsApp messages sent and received by Khalid Masood, who killed four and injured 50 on March 22 in London before being shot dead himself. They can’t access those messages because WhatsApp uses “end to end encryption.”

What this means is that WhatsApp messages are encrypted at the sender’s end and decrypted at the receiver’s end. The company itself never has access to the plain text of messages and therefore cannot turn that information over to police.

Rudd would like to see “back doors” built into applications so that governments can access messages’ plain text under “carefully thought-through, legally covered arrangements.” That’s a pipe dream, for two reasons.

First, such a “back door” would destroy both the security of, and the user base for, any app whose creator allowed it. If one government can get in through a back door, so can other governments, and so can non-government hackers. No one who cares about messaging security and privacy (including, but obviously in no way limited to, terrorists) will use such an app.

Secondly, there are, and always will be, secure “end to end encryption” alternatives to apps whose makers allow them to be legally crippled as Rudd would like. That genie escaped the bottle in 1991 when Phil Zimmerman released the first version of “Pretty Good Privacy,” a strong encryption program that anyone can install and learn to use on, these days, almost any device (using the OpenPGP standard).

Governments’ war on strong encryption has been over for more than two decades. Strong encryption, and the public, won.

That doesn’t mean your encrypted messages are secure, though. As WikiLeaks’s “Vault 7” release of CIA documents shows, the world’s intelligence agencies have shifted focus from hobbling encryption to compromising our devices and the operating systems that run on them.  That way they can read our messages before we encrypt them or after we decrypt them.

Remember: It’s not Amber Rudd and us versus the terrorists. It’s Amber Rudd and the terrorists versus us.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION  HISTORY

• “Rudd Re-Declares Governments’ Lost War on Strong Encryption,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 03/27/17
• “Rudd re-declares governments’ lost war on strong encryption,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Pahrump Valley, Nevada Times, 03/29/17
• “Rudd Re-Declares Governments’ Lost War on Strong Encryption,” Key West: The Newspaper [Florida], 03/31/17