FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday that the FBI would not let the White House interfere with the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server. Efforts to fully access the devices are ongoing, officials said.
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Comey shared the information at a Senate FBI oversight hearing after Sen. “We understand that encryption is a very important part of being secure on the internet”.
In June, he told the audience at EPIC’s Champions of Freedom event in 2015: “Like many of you, we at Apple reject the idea that our customers should have to make tradeoffs between privacy and security”.
One of the shooters in a May attack on a “Draw Mohammed” cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, exchanged 109 encrypted electronic messages with suspected militants overseas on the morning of the attack, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation said on Wednesday.
After numerous meetings with technology companies, Comey said he’s come to realize that granting special access to law enforcement is not a technological problem, but a question of business imperatives. “Good people have formed a decision to design products and sell products where court orders are ineffective”.
Simpson, 30, and Soofi, 34, were attempting to carry out an attack modeled after January’s Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, law-enforcement officials have said.
The FBI director did not offer any suggestions as to how such a change might work.
Comey said despite what some have said that it will “break the internet” or lead to “unacceptable insecurity” if court orders are complied with, “it’s not a technical issue“. He added that the government should not be telling companies how to operate their systems, nor does the government want a “backdoor” solution.
Comey said the couple was clearly inspired by a foreign terror organization, but that investigators did not yet know whether their online courtship was arranged by such a group or developed naturally on its own. Risch said Marquez and Farook “were plotting an actual attack” that year, including purchasing weapons, but became apprehensive and shelved the plan because of law enforcement activity and arrests in the area.
“We ought not put USA manufacturers in a position in which they’d be punished relative to other manufacturers”, Lee warned.
Comey also provided a specific example of a situation in which he said encryption was an obstacle for law enforcement. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, spoke in favor of government intervention.
“I am sure there were communications between them and somebody else”. While he hasn’t said anything in this particular instance, Apple CEO Tim cook has repeatedly defended encryption by default.
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“I think there’s no way we solve this entire problem”, Comey said.
