"If you like your phone secretly spied on, you can keep it," appears to be the message from the FBI, as Bloomberg reports [8], FBI Director James Comey said yesterday that companies like Apple and Google should be required to build surveillance capabilities into their products to help law enforcement with their probes. Technology has become “the tool of choice” for terrorists and other dangerous criminals, Comey fears(and so Americans should willingly give up their privacy?) "we are struggling to keep up with changing technology and maintain our ability to actually collect communications we are authorized to collect." Concluding with his M.A.D. "it's for your own good" propaganda, Comey warned "if the challenges of real time data interception threatened to leave us in the dark, encryption threatens to lead us all to a very dark place."
The expanding options for communicating over the Internet and the increasing adoption of encryption technologies could leave law enforcement agents “in the dark” and unable to collect evidence against criminals, the Director of the FBI said in a speech on Thursday.
In a post-Snowden plea for a policy more permissive of spying, FBI Director James B. Comey raised the specters of child predators, violent criminals, and crafty terrorists to argue that companies should build surveillance capabilities into the design of their products and allow lawful interception of communications. In his speech given at the Brookings Institute in Washington DC, Comey listed four cases where having access to a mobile phone or laptop proved crucial to an investigation and another case where such access was critical to exonerating wrongly accused teens.
All of that will go away, or at least become much harder, if the current trend continues, he argued.
“Those charged with protecting our people aren’t always able to access the evidence we need to prosecute crime and prevent terrorism even with lawful authority,” Comey said in the published speech. “We have the legal authority to intercept and access communications and information pursuant to court order, but we often lack the technical ability to do so.”
Technology has become “the tool of choice” for terrorists and other dangerous criminals and default encryption settings on devices and networks are becoming an obstacle for law enforcement, Comey said.
Providers of new communication services should create a “front door” method to intercept data as certain technology isn’t covered by legislation that requires telecom companies to have monitoring capabilities, FBI Director James Comey said yesterday at a Brookings Institution event in Washington.
“We are struggling to keep up with changing technology and maintain our ability to actually collect communications we are authorized to collect,” Comey said.
“If the challenges of real time data interception threatened to leave us in the dark, encryption threatens to lead us all to a very dark place,” Comey said.
Not everyone is buying into the idea that we all need to sacrifice our privacy for the good of the whole... (as Bloomberg reports)
Some data security experts, including Jonathan Turley, a constitutional-law professor at The George Washington University Law School, say assertions that new technology hampers law enforcement are exaggerated because police can still obtain evidence through traditional court warrants. Much of the data sent to or from the devices can also still be captured and investigators can hack software to collect evidence.
“Now, more than ever, we need strong security to combat malicious hackers and deter overly intrusive government surveillance,” Nuala O’Connor, president of the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, said in response to Comey’s speech yesterday. “Law enforcement already has many legitimate ways to obtain the data stored on our devices,” O’Connor said in a statement.
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Google have not responded (yet) but Apple's Tim Cook wrote:
“We have never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will.”
