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Former FBI Director James Comey Reveals How Apple and Google's Encryption Efforts Drove Him 'Crazy' (fastcompany.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In his explosive new book, A Higher Loyalty, fired FBI director James Comey denounces President Trump as "untethered to the truth" and likens him to a "mob boss," but he also touches on other topics during his decades-long career in law enforcement -- including his strong objection to the tech industry's encryption efforts. When Apple and Google announced in 2014 that they would be moving their mobile devices to default encryption, by emphasizing that making them immune to judicial orders was good for society, "it drove me crazy," he writes. He goes on to lament the lack of "true listening" between tech and law enforcement, saying that "the leaders of the tech companies don't see the darkness the FBI sees," such as terrorism and organized crime.
He writes, "I found it appalling that the tech types couldn't see this. I would frequently joke with the FBI 'Going Dark' team assigned to seek solutions, 'Of course the Silicon Valley types don't see the darkness -- they live where it's sunny all the time and everybody is rich and smart." But Comey understood it was an unbelievably difficult issue and that public safety had to be balanced with privacy concerns.
He writes, "I found it appalling that the tech types couldn't see this. I would frequently joke with the FBI 'Going Dark' team assigned to seek solutions, 'Of course the Silicon Valley types don't see the darkness -- they live where it's sunny all the time and everybody is rich and smart." But Comey understood it was an unbelievably difficult issue and that public safety had to be balanced with privacy concerns.
I hope it continues to drive him and others of his ilk crazy.
it would be nice to see how "crazy" he would feel if his own phone was hacked, his personal bank accounts stolen, his medical history made public, his emails analyzed in a foreign county just because a backdoor was mandatory for mobile devices.
I appreciate the work and dedication that law enforcement have to serve this country but that's where it ends. Cracking criminal is the task that law enforcement MUST do. The tech industry can help whenever they can but that's not a required responsibility. If they say they cannot help, they cannot help.
He goes on to lament the lack of "true listening" between tech and law enforcement, saying that "the leaders of the tech companies don't see the darkness the FBI sees," such as terrorism and organized crime.
You colossally ignorant savage, you see tiny issues like terrorism and organized crime and don't see the darkness George Orwell, the Founding Fathers, and many others saw -- a boot stepping on a human face, forever.
Billions continue to live in despotism as their leaders use the tech you want for "crime" to catch and punish any challengers to their power.
Both Russia and China have leaders currently consolidating power for the long term, at least partly because of the lack of crypto government can't get into.
Thou impious fool.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
"the leaders of the tech companies don't see the darkness the FBI sees"
They see a different, more dangerous kind of darkness: one brought about by the FBI and law enforcement and the rest of the government itself. The 4th amendment and the broader right to privacy itself is supremely important to avoiding a tyrannical government.
This is more important than any benefit against terrorism and organized crime.
So what we know about Comey is:
(1) He was politically motivated in Hillary's E-mail case, trying to help her gain legitimacy after election.
(2) He was politically motivated to hurt Trump.
(3) He likes to spy on American citizens.
"A Higher Loyalty" indeed. The FBI started out being run by megalomaniac, corrupt authoritarians, and little has apparently changed.
How about the leaks that could cost him is license to practice law?
Let's look for more information
The Moonie Times, Zero Hedge, World Nut Daily, Daily Caller, The Blaze, etc, etc, the usual suspects.
What is the basis for this and why are no serious publications reporting on this lawsuit? Because Ty Clevenger's lawsuit has no basis and zero chance of succeeding.
The whole thing is based on an article claiming that 4 out of 7 of Comey's memos had confidential information, and therefore he must have forwarded at least one classified memo to his law-school friend.
But the article doesn't actually cover when the information was deemed classified, it could very well have been classified after the fact in an effort to tar Comey. It also doesn't give any indication whether Comey would have reasonably thought the information to be classified, in fact he explicitly testified that he prepared the memos to be unclassified.
Not to mention the original reporter and only source I found has a history of inaccurate reporting, so we could be missing some crucial context.
I stole this Sig
This book hasn't been released yet. The link provides a short quote and opinions about the context without sufficient information to be useful for anything but marketing hype. The link is an advertorial designed to generate hype.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I mean, the article proving this is bullshit is still on the front page here. At best it's a minor inconvenience. Your phone's been owned 8 ways from Sunday. This crap from Comey is all just theater.
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He [James Comey] goes on to lament the lack of "true listening" between tech and law enforcement, saying that "the leaders of the tech companies don't see the darkness the FBI sees,"
Similarly, the FBI appears to be not listening to the tech companies and not seeing the darkness they see. Things such state secrets repeatedly escaping (Snoden, Reality Winner, TSA keys), a perception that when a secret is shared with somebody else, it no longer is a secret and a belief that if one person can "break" encryption, so can somebody else.
Odd how quickly you trust news stories that come from other biases only and from even less credible sources when you want them to be true.
How often do you put your own beliefs on news through the same process?
I subject my beliefs and sources of information to constant scrutiny.
But I'm under no obligation to treat the far-right propagandist cargo cults masquerading as news organizations with anything other than scorn.
Again with this one, I did my obligatory research, and in place of a fire I found clowns throwing smoke bombs.
I stole this Sig
Police hold a lot of power. The definition of the boundaries on that power should not be definable by them.
Police (ethical ones) really only care about what they can do within the law to solve crimes. It’s not their job to think about the big questions, and I’m not going to fault them for that (although the top cops should probably try to step outside their box).
But it’s also why I don’t put a lot of weight into their opinions on things like this, or the rights of the accused, or the inviolability of personal property. And it’s one of the many reasons the people who *did* spend time thinking about the big questions gave us a Bill of Rights.
#DeleteChrome
The Boston Marathon bomber and the father of the nighclub shooter in Orlando were paid FBI informants. Even the Garland, TX terrorists were in communication with the FBI before their attack, and a security guard is suing the FBI for not stopping it. It will be interesting what comes out during discovery.
Hacker culture started during the Baby Boom's coming-of-age period. The government was in a massive crackdown on the young population, in a ways far too numerous and complex to go into here. The reaction was a distrust of the government and institutions related to its support and function, and both cultural and organized resistance to them. This reaction was massive.
Among those institutions were law enforcement and the criminal justice system, which had been massively perverted to attack the government's perceived opposition. This is when the drug war started. This is when RICO was passed, encouraging police to steal people's property. This is when concentration camps for dissidents were legislated and designed (but, fortunately, not used and the legislation later repealed). This is when the FBI, along with special "red squads" of local police, were used to infiltrate and disrupt political organizations (See COINTELPRO),. I could go on. Police were viewed as an invading army.
Similarly, the Vietnam conflict and the draft - a threat of slavery and death - were used to "channel" the new generation into desired occupations - and to stretch their entry into the job market out by pushing more of them into college than would historically have gone, in order to avoid an expected economic crash to dwarf the Great Depression. Institutions in any way connected with the war were considered culpable and attacked: Banks (help fund the war), chemical companies (make explosives, defoliants, and Napalm), the monopoly telephone company (collected a war tax).
In the midst of this (and to a large extent, in the California counter-culture hub that became Silicon Valley), personal computers were developed and the programs and applications for them were designed and/or deployed.
Is it any wonder companies (pre-institutional-web), founded and built up by the people who grew up in that environment, as part of that culture, would distrust law enforcement and favor the interests of their equipment's users over it?
And who's the point company in this conflict? Apple! Built by Jobs and Woz. Who got their seed money making "Blue Boxes" - devices to bypass the "war-supporting price-gouging" monopoly phone company's billing - during that era.
Doesn't surprise me at all. (Of course I lived through it, and to some extent was part of it. So I no doubt have personally seen more of it than the massively sanitized, repeatedly rewritten, dumbed-down, and politically-warped historical record, as promulgated by the current media conglomerates, will ever tell you.)
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That's what the DNC would like you to believe when really it was their fixing of the primary in favor of Hillary. Say what you like about Trump, at least he was able to win the primary without engaging in election fraud and voter suppression.
Why should any of use come out to support a candidate that couldn't be bothered to give us a reason why she should win other than vague platitudes and I'm a girl.
With 5 to 6 TIMES percent of U.S. population sitting in prisons vs. European and Australian countries with similar standards of living and systems of governance I would say LEA is already doing an amazing job considering their hands are tied by "darkness".
Look how well they've done with civil assert forfeiture being so successful trend line over decades has actually managed to exceed sum total of everything reported stolen. Way to go LEA!! Truly an amazing result. Imagine would it could be if only speaking in codes unknown to LEA were outlawed.
Steady bending of sentencing to enhance plea deals as an effective means of extortion now results in a 60 to 70% disparity in jail time for the same crime for those whose only additional sin was failure to forfeit their right to jury trial.
What this country really needs is for more people to give up more of their rights so LEA can do an even better job and keep everyone even safer. We're already 5-6 times safer than everyone else....
Oh what's that you say? We're not? You mean even with all of those extra people sitting in jail U.S. is 3-4 times less safe? No... can't be... I'm shocked...
Can people in the FBI decide themselves who to be loyal too?
In the title, Comey is referring to Trump's demand of him for loyalty, which was highly inappropriate. The "higher loyalty" refers his loyalty to the Constitution of the United States, which rules above all men - including the President.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
"the leaders of the tech companies don't see the darkness the FBI sees"...
Gee Comey, ever consider the fact that tech companies don't see this because the government chose to keep that CLASSIFIED?!?
Not to mention pointing out the fact that the tech companies kind of woke the hell up with regards to default encryption when Edward Snowden revealed in 2013 what the US Government does when encryption is NOT the default standard. How ironic our OWN Intel community caused this shift in default behavior...
After all the political policing used by the FBI against MLK, war protesters, and countless other dissidents, it's both hilarious and said to watch the modern American left fall down and worship at the feet of high-ranking officers in the American Gestapo like James Comey, Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller. At least be consistent.
for encryption the government is not a defacto 2nd party.
That would imply that you had the intention of sharing the information with them.
For communications, the other end of the conversation is the 2nd party.
For storage THERE Is NO SECOND PARTY!
The government is a 3rd party, as you had no intention of supplying them with access to this information.
They are trying to FORCE people who have committed no crime to make them a default 2nd party.
they have also show extreme bad faith in automatically recording and storing information illegally, without any knowledge of the public (whom they claim to represent) and keeping that information because they want it..They only got caught out by accident and did their very best to block that knowledge from the general public.
They have also established secret courts that claim to protect rights, however there is no public discussion of such things, no transparency, even long after the fact, and they have been caught intentionally lying about such things to hide their actions in court, destroying due process (parallel construction).
Is there any surprise that the public feel a need to protect themselves from such actions?
Note however that the government HAS worked to put in place protections for themselves against this, although with limited success, by trying to put in place exceptions for government officials.
That is not democracy, that is a surveillance state where the government wants the ability to dig through peoples history if and when it wishes for whatever purpose it wishes. It would be more democratically correct for the opposite to be in place - so the public has the right to dig through the history of the people asking to be placed in control.
But we are also capable of something you apparently cannot do: See beyond our own needs. Which is scary considering that your job is to put yourself into the boots of criminals so you understand how they think which allows you to catch them more easily.
We know that catching terrorists is harder when there is encryption. But flawed encryption means that terrorists will use perfect encryption while your industry, having to obey the law, has to use faulty one which can easily be cracked, not only by you but also by, say, North Korea. Which is certainly interesting in case of, say, a company developing new and more efficient means of enriching nuclear material.
Apparently you can't think this far. It's not that hard, really. In other words, I rarely agree with Trump, but firing you was one of his more sensible moves. We don't need ignorant people who are unfit for their job in critical positions.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Fine by me, insider trading is the least of our problems. It offends the American sense of fair play, but is pretty harmless compared to the military-industrial complex, mass incarceration, environmental destruction, etc.
Not really. Figure that 15 to 30 percent of Internet traffic is porn. That's a lot of images and movies into which data can be injected steganographically. Do you really want to look through all that porn and determine whether it contains hidden messages?
No, wait....
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That's easy. Comey, in both cases. The thing is, Comey didn't think he was sabotaging her. He thought he was helping her by trying to get out a head when she became president. He was 100% sure just like those pollsters that said Hillary had a 98% to win.
That, in itself should bother every single person that believes that law enforcement should be politically neutral. He re-opened the case because he believed it would favor her.
Om, nomnomnom...
Trump voters sure are dumb. They think "Shillary" is a clever insult. Boy are you dumb. You're dumb.
It is a clever insult, maybe it's just too highbrow for your low humor. I mean you used dumb, three times. Sure is the height of intellectual humor coming from you. After all, everyone knows the left can't meme. I prefer Hillary "Side of Beef" Clinton myself.
Om, nomnomnom...
Trump is a scumbag you wouldn't leave alone in a room with your teenage daughter and the FBI hates encryption? Well, that sounds like a book full of amazing revelations; I must get a copy and see if he sheds any light on just what those bears are up to in the woods. Damn bears!
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Disgraced formner gestapo chief flatulently criticizes nouveau riche president for insufficient authoritarianism, pretends to be appalled by Silicon Valley tycoons who sell pretend-secure cellphones.
Remember when Trump tweeted about how bombing syria was a really bad idea when Obama did it, now it's mission accomplished apparently. He is a very stable genius after all.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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I am not sure. One flaw of open source is the lack of regression testing and assumption that code just works and someone else looked at it. It is the tragedy of the commons and somebody elseâ(TM)s problem rolled into one. Take for example the heart bleed bug. It was there for ten years before someone figured it out. So, you could easily introduce a backdoor is you are clever and focus on low churn sections of code.
In God we trust, all others require data.
^ The memoirs of James Comey
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Comey and other law enforcement types lacks perspective on this issue. They want an easy way to do their job at the expense of a fundamental right of the people who pay his salary. Police and detective work is made hard by our Constitution and laws, as it should be. Law-abiding citizens should not be treated like criminals to make life easier for people like Comey.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Highly inappropriate?? What the hell? Comey was a bureaucrat - and EMPLOYEE of Trump, who was elected to the exact job of being in charge of the executive branch. I think you Comey is a bit of a slimeball (as the book shows) and his use of the word 'loyalty' is a sign of just how things work within the government (for which Trump is an outsider).
Any good leader in an organization, anywhere, would fire an employee for not running things as his boss wished. Only to call it "non loyalty" is laughable, it's just plain insubordination. If you read even Comey's own words about the meeting, Trump sounds like any new manager meeting an employee, and Comey is instantly defensive and mistrustful. It is no wonder at all why he was fired. None of the senior bureaucrats liked Trump who was coming in to derail their gravy train they'd spent so long building.