Comey’s testimony is the latest effort by the Obama administration to pressure Silicon Valley companies to design their products in ways that will allow law enforcement agencies to monitor communications that would otherwise be rendered unreadable by advances in encryption.
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Authorities believe the suspects were recruited and encouraged to carry out the attacks from actors overseas.
“Strong encryption would still be available from foreign providers”, Leahy said.
It doesn’t matter that their wife and brother, respectively, both hope to be the next President of the United States – Bill Clinton and George W. Bush say that nothing is going to come between their unlikely friendship.
He cited as an example the case of a 26-year-old terror suspect who was fatally shot by police in Boston last month after authorities said he lunged at them with a military-style knife. “ISIL’s strategic weaknesses are real”, Obama said.
“We have encountered a very tight flash to bang”, meaning that a new batch of possible extremists no longer has the patience or training to lay in wait for months or years before a strike, as members of the core al Qaeda group once did. You had a guy who was in touch in an encrypted way with these ISIL recruiters and we believe was bent on doing something on July 4th. While some of these conversations take place on publicly accessed social networking sites, others take place over encrypted private messaging platforms. But my reaction to that is: “I’m not sure they’ve really tried”.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation director said the encryption problem goes beyond terrorism cases.
As it turns out, he had videotaped his assaults on his smartphone and the phone didn’t have the encryption enabled.
“As Katie reported in June, House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes said, We face the highest threat level we have ever faced in this country, today…even after 9/11”. Instead, it is seeking to work with companies to devise a compromise. She expressed concern about end-to-end encryption in which only the user can access the communication.
Yates said that some technology companies already access users’ encrypted information to sell advertisements.
Earlier, Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates rejected the notion that the federal government is looking for backdoor entry to encrypted communications.
Their concerns were three fold. Personal privacy and Internet security, she said, are not absolute. Second, the technologists said that building exceptional access into the system would create vulnerabilities. Critics of the FBI worry that weakening online protection to give law enforcement access degrades security for everyone.
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“Lawmakers”, the scientists and engineers warned in a letter to Comey, “should not risk the real economic, geopolitical and strategic benefits of an open and secure Internet for law enforcement gains that are at best minor and tactical”.
