
FBI chief calls encryption a ‘major public safety issue’ - t3f
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-chief-calls-encryption-a-major-public-safety-issue/2018/01/09/29a04166-f555-11e7-b34a-b85626af34ef_story.html
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iamcasen
The thing I find funny is that they aren't acknowledging the fact that they
used to solve crimes before cell phones existed. What did they do back then?
Hell, even phone calls could be made rather anonymously. They have way more
metadata to pour over these days than they did in the past.

Their truly sick desire to undermine the privacy and security of ordinary
citizens is just that.... They won't solve more crimes by breaking encryption.

~~~
maltalex
> The thing I find funny is that they aren't acknowledging the fact that they
> used to solve crimes before cell phones existed. What did they do back then?

I'm not a big fan of government surveillance, but I find this argument
problematic. Crime was different before the Internet and cell phones.
Criminals learned to use the new tech with the rest of us. For example, not
that long ago if the FBI had a person followed and his land line monitored,
they could know who that person was in contact with. Today, that person might
be exchanging messages over an encrypted app, on an encrypted phone, and
there's no way of telling who with.

I'm with you about the fact that privacy of ordinary citizens is being
undermined, and that through technology, invasive surveillance became so cheap
and easy to deploy, that it's everywhere.

But let's not confuse state level surveillance of the whole population with
targeted surveillance approved in a legitimate proceeding by an independent
judge in an independent court against an actual criminal. Citizens typically
want to allow the latter, while preventing the former. Governments tend say
they're doing the latter, while doing both. So "public safety" arguments might
be used to promote anti-democratic surveillance of a population, but can also
be legitimate concerns of a law enforcement agency trying to investigate
actual crimes.

~~~
StanislavPetrov
>Governments tend say they're doing the latter, while doing both.

Which is exactly why their powers need to be severely limited. In a fantasy
world of rainbows and lollipops where the government are the "good guys" with
only pure good in their hearts they could be trusted with limitless powers to
pursue the "bad guys". In the actual world that exists, the government is made
up of regular people - people who lie, cheat, steal, and do all sorts of
things for their own purposes. If history has taught us anything, it should be
that power corrupts. Far better that we live in a world where a small
percentage of crimes go unsolved than a police state with ubiquitous tracking,
surveillance and real-time monitoring where its an absolutely certainty that
we all suffer the consequences.

~~~
maltalex
I agree. It's a matter of balance between the two. Especially when you don't
know which "end" of the judicial system you might face, if any.

You might be accused of a crime and then you'll be rooting for the rights of
the accused or individual rights in general, or you might be the victim of a
crime, in which case you might feel like supporting broader police powers.

------
maxander
> Wray said the bureau was unable to gain access to the content of 7,775
> devices in fiscal 2017 — more than half of all the smartphones it tried to
> crack in that time period — despite having a warrant from a judge.

So if 7,775 is "more than half," a conservative estimate of how many phone's
they're attempting to crack per year (so far) is about 10,000?

> “We’re not interested in the millions of devices of everyday citizens,” he
> said in New York at Fordham University’s International Conference on Cyber
> Security. “We’re interested in those devices that have been used to plan or
> execute terrorist or criminal activities.”

How many thousands of terrorist cellphones do you really think they've seized
in 2017? Maybe a dozen? This is the FBI, remember, so it's only counting
phones seized on U.S. soil (goodness knows what the CIA's tally is, but that's
a whole separate issue.) I haven't been on the lookout for "authorities append
would-be terrorist" stories, and those definitely appear from time to time,
but they're not a _daily_ occurrence.

Terrorism isn't a significant factor in this issue, as a question of the FBI's
day-to-day operations. It's just a word that surveillance hawks have
discovered gets results. I'm sure the ~9,999 non-terrorist phones they're
trying to crack were owned by some pretty terrible people, but if the FBI were
saying "give us a backdoor into all your devices so it'll be easier for us to
go after online-poker rings and weed dealers," they'd be laughed out of the
room.

------
notyourday
Luckily, math does not quite care about opinions of the FBI chief. Encryption
is a done deal. This genie is not going back to the bottle. Now it is just
going to be an arms race between building a better mouse and building a better
mouse trap.

~~~
dmitrygr
Until they make distributing software with unbreakable encryption punishable
by jail time. Sadly gvmnt can win this one

~~~
mr_toad
Decades ago distributing certain forms of encryption was (for practical
purposes) illegal in the USA. People used to get it from non-US servers.

------
bluehazed
"New FBI chief continues tradition of (willfully?) misunderstanding
communications encryption"

~~~
AnimalMuppet
See my top-level comment. I don't think he's misunderstanding encryption. I
think he's misunderstanding (or mis-defining) "public safety".

~~~
bluehazed
Your point certainly stands, but this is misunderstanding e2e encryption to a
point.

Reasonably secure open source solutions exist at large for encrypted
messaging, and people who _really_ want to keep their communications hidden
will simple not adhere to these regulations.

Meanwhile, we'd be weakening domestic standards for all "law abiding"
citizens/entities. A back door is never just a back door for the person who
put it there.

------
joeblow9999
In other news, their inability to read minds also limits their ability to
solve crimes.

Lack of time travel as well.

Torturing suspects leads to more confessions, and thus convictions, so that's
a problem too.

Hell, the fact that they need a warrant to ransack your house is also an
impediment.

~~~
erric
>Lack of time travel as well.

Looks like this has been solved:
[https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/04/sheriff...](https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/04/sheriffs-
deputy-compares-drone-surveillance-of-compton-to-big-brother/360954/)

------
AnimalMuppet
Public safety requires that the authorities be able to get all the information
they want (or so believes the FBI chief). But echoing the founding fathers,
the rest of us might wonder: Who's going to keep us safe from the FBI?

~~~
cvwright
> Who's going to keep us safe from the FBI?

It's a reasonable question. And it has an answer: The same crypto / infosec
community that's keeping us safe right now.

If governments are going to demand some sort of "exceptional access", then
that's just one more constraint that our systems have to satisfy. Figuring out
how to do that, while maintaining security for the rest of the users, is the
million-dollar question.

I understand that after the Crypto Wars of the 1990's, the tech community has
been super resistant to working on any sort of technology that allows for any
sort of compromise. But I fear that if we don't -- if security has to be all-
or-nothing -- then eventually we're going to wind up with some horrible
mandate for backdoors or key escrow or something worse.

~~~
mindslight
Fuck. That. Noise.

There is no such thing as a "compromise" on an issue of individual rights.
Every "proposal" on this topic can only be another tooth on the ratchet of
[democratic] totalitarianism.

Computers exist, and form a natural extension of the mind. To constrain what
individuals may compute is to deny the inalienable right to think. If every
computer is mandated to be an agent of the state (as such "proposals"
inherently imply), then the Individual is left completely computationless (ie
nearly powerless) against the state-computer.

This rekindled expectation of prying into individuals' private data is
entirely due to the past decade of naive adoption of "web 2.0" untrustworthy
computing, fueled by the profits from commercial surveillance. As
technologists, we need to move off and repudiate this broken centralizing
model (for us _and_ the plebs), not be looking for ways to further enshrine
it.

------
silverpikezero
> “We’re not interested in the millions of devices of everyday citizens,” he
> [Comey] said in New York at Fordham University’s International Conference on
> Cyber Security. “We’re interested in those devices that have been used to
> plan or execute terrorist or criminal activities.”

Oh so they only want to know about the bad people? That's a relief.

~~~
cvwright
I know you're trying to be snarky, but he's responding to a very real
accusation from our community.

Every time this question comes up, half of us freak out and scream that the
FBI is trying to grab all of our deepest darkest secrets.

I'm not inclined to trust them very far on this issue either, but I still
think we should take it as a good sign that Wray is aware of our concerns and
that he publicly acknowledges their validity.

~~~
StanislavPetrov
>but he's responding to a very real accusation from our community.

No he isn't. His whole point is that the FBI can't know for sure which of us
is a terrorist or "bad guy" unless they can sift through all of our data and
all of our devices to find out. Given the history of the US government
classifying every sort of activist, from quaker to environmentalist as
"terrorists", his argument should be tremendously unpersuasive to everyone who
thinks it through.

[http://abcnews.go.com/News/Blotter/fbi-spied-peta-
greenpeace...](http://abcnews.go.com/News/Blotter/fbi-spied-peta-greenpeace-
anti-war-activists/story?id=11682844)

------
Myrth
Distrust between the public and authority is what they need to focus on.

~~~
mindslight
Preaching totalitarian propaganda is much easier and more glamorous than eg
actually prosecuting murders (and other injustice) committed by local police
departments.

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myaso
FBI chief _might_ change his mind when he isn't in office anymore.

