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James Comey: the Man Who Wants To Outlaw Encryption
Patrick O'Neill writes: "There has not been a tradeoff between liberty and security in our response to terrorism in this country and in our efforts to offer security to the people of the United States," said James Comey, now the director of the FBI. Comey was the number two man in the Department of Justice during the Bush years when NSA and law enforcement surveillance of Americans grew to unprecedented heights. Now he's pushing to stop encryption by default on Apple and Android devices.
A good passage...
“The FBI makes this proposal to look like they’re looking for a simple law to add a simple feature,” says Robert Graham, CEO at Errata Security. “But when you look into it, what they’re really asking for is dramatic, it’s a huge thing. They’d need to outlaw certain kinds of code. Possessing crypto code would become illegal.”
Ask hackers and other cybersecurity experts, and they'll tell you that the entire idea of a “backdoor” is a bureaucratic fantasy with little basis in technical reality.
“You can't build a backdoor that only the good guys can walk through,” cryptographer and author Bruce Schneier explained. “Encryption protects against cybercriminals, industrial competitors, the Chinese secret police, and the FBI. You're either vulnerable to eavesdropping by any of them, or you're secure from eavesdropping from all of them.”