James Comey Says 'Dozens' Of Terrorists Have Eluded The FBI Thanks To Encryption

Say That Again

from the 0-999-TERRORISTS-UNSURVEILLED dept

The administration won’t back FBI Director James Comey’s push for encryption backdoors. Neither will Congress, at least not at this point. (But just give ’em one terrorist attack…) Former intelligence officials have written off backdoored encryption as a lost cause, if not a genuinely bad idea. But Comey continues to peddle his “gone dark” future to whoever will listen. In this case, it was the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

The Committee wanted a ballpark estimate of the “going dark” problem. Comey delivered, with an answer both incredibly vague and completely underwhelming.

The De­part­ment of Justice has in the past de­murred when asked to ap­prox­im­ate the scale of what of­fi­cials of­ten call the “go­ing dark prob­lem.” But pressed by com­mit­tee chair­man Ron John­son on how many ter­ror sus­pects his agents have ac­tu­ally lost track of be­cause of en­cryp­tion, Comey on Wed­nes­day gave the closest thing to a stat­ist­ic that the de­part­ment has pub­licly shared.

“Prob­ably the best num­ber I can give in an open set­ting is dozens,” Comey said.

It’s a great answer, if you like unverifiable claims that suggest anywhere from 24 to hundreds of terrorists are now operating beyond the reach of subpoenas and national security letters. (Although you’d think if it was hundreds, Comey would have said hundreds.) This answer is about as precise as the “0-999” bands the government forces private companies to use when reporting government requests for user data. What it isn’t, however, is a ringing endorsement of Comey’s “going dark” narrative. Not that one committee member didn’t try to help out Comey with his story.

John­son seemed taken aback at the re­sponse and moved on to ask an­oth­er ques­tion. Later, he re­turned to the FBI dir­ect­or’s an­swer.

“I’m a little con­cerned about num­bers, but I will say, I’m sur­prised if it is only a couple dozen people who have been in­spired by so­cial me­dia and then moved in­to en­cryp­ted ac­counts,” John­son said.

Whatever the number actually is, it’s high enough for Comey. And high enough for Johnson. And, coincidentally, it’s also the same (approximate) number of potential ISIS recruits the FBI has managed to “disrupt,” according to Comey.

FBI counterterrorism agents followed dozens of potential militants around the United States full time over the summer and disrupted activities pursued by many of them, FBI Director James Comey told a congressional committee on Thursday.

Comey also told the committee this:

He said Islamic State militants had become expert at attracting potential recruits through social media pitches, and had mastered how to coax promising recruits into using private communications channels.

“When they find a live one, they will move them off Twitter, and move them to an end-to-end encrypted messaging app,” Comey said. He said without a court order, the FBI could not read such encrypted message traffic.

This statement makes it sound as though “going dark” isn’t a problem with technology, but a problem with paperwork. Either the FBI’s used to getting this stuff without it, or having suspects fall off the social media grid makes obtaining court orders a little more difficult. Either way, it doesn’t exactly sound like punching holes in encryption is the only way the FBI can stay abreast of the latest in terrorist chatter.

Filed Under: encryption, fbi, going dark, james comey