FBI Quietly Removes Recommendation To Encrypt Your Phone... As FBI Director Warns How Encryption Will Lead To Tears
from the keeping-you-safe...-or-keeping-you-vulnerable dept
Back in October, we highlighted the contradiction of FBI Director James Comey raging against encryption and demanding backdoors, while at the very same time the FBI's own website was suggesting mobile encryption as a way to stay safe. Sometime after that post went online, all of the information on that page about staying safe magically disappeared, though thankfully I screenshotted it at the time:
Calling the use of encrypted phones and computers a “huge problem” and an affront to the “rule of law,” Comey, painted an apocalyptic picture of the world if the communications technology isn’t banned.So, until recently, the FBI was actively recommending you encrypt your data to protect your safety -- and yet, today it's "an affront to the rule of law." Is this guy serious?
“We’re drifting to a place where a whole lot of people are going to look at us with tears in their eyes,” he told the House Appropriations Committee, describing a hypothetical in which a kidnapped young girl’s phone is discovered but can’t be unlocked.
More directly, this should raise serious questions about what Comey thinks his role is at the FBI (or the FBI's role is for the country)? Is it to keep Americans safe -- or is it to undermine their privacy and security just so it can spy on everyone?
Not surprisingly, Comey pulls out the trifecta of FUD in trying to explain why it needs to spy on everyone: pedophiles, kidnappers and drug dealers:
“Tech execs say privacy should be the paramount virtue,” Comey continued, “When I hear that I close my eyes and say try to image what the world looks like where pedophiles can’t be seen, kidnapper can’t be seen, drug dealers can’t be seen.”Except we know exactly what that looks like -- because that's the world we've basically always lived with. And yet, law enforcement folks like the FBI and various police departments were able to use basic detective work to track down criminals.
If you want to understand just how ridiculous Comey's arguments are, simply replace his desire for unencrypted devices with video cameras in every corner of your home that stream directly into the FBI. Same thing. Would that make it easier for the FBI to solve some crimes? Undoubtedly. Would it be a massive violation of privacy and put many more people at risk? Absolutely.
It's as if Comey has absolutely no concept of a cost-benefit analysis. All "bad people" must be stopped, even if it means destroying all of our freedoms, based on what he has to say. That's insane -- and raises serious questions about his competence to lead a government agency charged with protecting the Constitution.
Filed Under: doj, encryption, fbi, james comey, mobile encryption, privacy, security
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It's interesting that I had two similar cases happen near me. A girl I know had her phone stolen recently. The phone was locked loosely with those patterns and the criminals found out the pattern to unlock it and wrecked havoc on her online presence. Luckily she was able to drop them off her mail before they could complete the reset password procedure they started for many of her accounts so she lost nothing meaningful (she had almost no pictures or other personal things either. Close to this case another girl, friend of mine lost her phone and I had taught her to encrypt it and secure with a password. She remotely wiped everything and locked the phone via her imei so if anybody stole or something (we aren't sure) then the person now has a nice paperweight.
Moral of the story: the FBI wants you to get screwed.
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