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.
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Now that that idea has been roundly shot down (and perhaps the good folk of Silicon Valley explained to Comey how math works), Comey is back with a new suggestion: companies should reevaluate the “business model” of end-to-end encryption, which can’t be unlocked by anyone else, with something weaker. “Some of it we have not”, one official said.
Comey has been the Obama administration’s most outspoken advocate of addressing what he calls the “going dark” phenomenon, in which only the end user holds the key to encrypted communications.
“If there is a conspiracy going on” among terrorists who use crypto, “that encryption ought to be able to be pierced”, said Feinstein, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), who quoted a 60 minutes interview in which President Barack Obama said that Clinton’s use of a private server was “not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered”. By contrast, BlackBerry devices offer high-level encrypted security, but encrypted data can still be accessed for law enforcement. “And to this day, I can’t tell you what he said with that terrorist 109 times the morning of that attack”. John Cornyn said, “I know that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is now investigating the private email server of the former Secretary of State”. “There are fundamentally hard underlying technical problems in doing what he wants reliably and safely”, he said.
“I hope the American people know the FBI well enough and the nature and character of this organization”, Comey said,
responding to concerns that the investigation could be polit-
ically tainted, according to The Hill newspaper.
He added that encryption provides vital protection for corporate secrets, law enforcement, academics and journalists – virtually all commerce and correspondence.
In addition, hundreds of smartphone apps offer encryption for various kinds of text, email and voice messages.
The practical problems with working around encrypted communications are manifold, privacy advocates have argued.
Comey indicated that these companies should be satisfied providing customers with encryption that allows for interception by the providers, who can then turn over the information to law enforcement.
“The question we have to ask is, ‘Should they change their business model?'” Comey says. “I promise you that’s the way we conduct ourselves”.
In an October report for the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point, ISIS expert J.M. Berger wrote that “Islamic State recruiters often favour messaging applications with strong encryption”.
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“There are plenty of companies today that provide secure services to their customers and still comply with court orders”.
