Posted on 12/13/2015 2:54:04 AM PST by markomalley
The FBI still wants backdoors into encrypted communications, it just doesn’t want to call them backdoors and it doesn’t want to dictate what they should look like.
FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he’d been in talks with unspecified tech leaders about his need to crack encrypted communications in order to track down terrorists and that these leaders understood the need.
In order to comply, tech companies need to change their business model – by selling only communications gear that enables law enforcement to access communications in unencrypted form, he says, rather than products that only the parties participating in the communication can decrypt.
Businesses that sell phones whose stored messages can’t be decrypted by third parties or apps that encrypt voice and data end-to-end need to switch to selling products that they, with a court order, can unencrypt the communications, Comey says.
“There are plenty of folks who make good phones and are able to unlock them in response to a court order,” Comey says. “In fact the makers of phones that today can’t be unlocked, a year ago they could be unlocked. … The government hopes to get to a place where if a judge issues an order the company figures out how to supply that information to the judge and figures out on its own what would be the best way. And people I think also better understand today the government doesn’t want a backdoor to do that.”
Encryption keys that allow third parties to unlock the communications being sought are commonly known as backdoors. Doing what he describes would require backdoors, whether or not he calls them something else. The concerns of the security industry are that any such backdoors represent built-in weaknesses in encryption schemes that could be exploited by parties who don’t have court orders.
He also says tech companies should just accept that they would be selling less secure products.
“The question we have to ask is, ‘Should they change their business model?’” Comey says. “That is a very, very hard question. Lots of implications to that. We have to wrestle with it because of what’s at stake.”
The bottom line, though, is that encryption hinders FBI investigations, and that tech leaders recognize it. “We see that encryption is getting in the way of our ability to have court orders effective to gather information we need in our most important work, and we all agree we have to figure out whether we can maximize both of those values - safety and security on the Internet and public safety. That’s good news.”
He cited the case in Garland, Texas, last May in which two men tried to shoot up a contest for drawing cartoons of Muhammed.
“[T]hat morning before one of those terrorists left to try to commit mass murder, he exchanged 109 messages with an overseas terrorist,” Comey says. “We have no idea what he said because those messages were encrypted. And to this day I can’t tell you what he said with that terrorist 109 times the morning of that attack. That is a big problem.”
Comey didn’t address whether the FBI knew about the communication before the attack or whether he thought it could have prevented it.
He says it’s not his place to decide whether new laws are the way to go to get what he wants. That’s up to the Obama administration, which so far has not sought such legislation.
What a bunch of disgusting dissembling (I'd say outright lying, but you'd never get the truth from them). He is implying that they had these cryptic 109 texts/emails before this event but 'just couldn't decrypt them'. Here's a clue, FBI PROVE IT! Prove you had them before and you tried ANYTHING (instead of just hoovering country wide comms from NSA afterwards). And if you, FBI, actually DID have them beforehand and really knew both ends, etc. why on God's green earth didn't you bring them in for questioning.
Director Comey, I just flat ass don't believe you in anything you say or do.
They apparently aren’t capable of reading Facebook posts, but they want access to every citizen’s personal information.
Agreed. The Garland attack was prevented by people with guns. The San Bernadino attack, even while the information was available to the government, went off without a hitch as far as we know. Guns are the key to stopping these terrorists.
{”Guns are the key to stopping these terrorists.”}
The Dictator says you must accept the government largesse, turn over your
gun, get your head chopped off, and quit bellyaching about it.
The government has been using every major security event as an excuse to attack cryptography for many months now. This is less about terrorism than about a raw power grab.
Exactly. This sort of article is just a cover for the governments incompetence. They'll try to blame the next attack on lack of weak encryption; "if we'd only been able to read every message from every person on the planet!". San Bernardino could have likely been prevented by simply flagging the fact the female terrorist gave a non-existant foreign address. Checking that does not require anything other than checking publicly available address info.
The co-opted, corrupted and politicized Fools, Bull*hitters and Idiots use their incompetence as an excuse to go after the rights, privacy and civil liberties of the American people.
How predictable.
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