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.

Comments

Good

[OffTheLip]

I hope it continues to drive him and others of his ilk crazy.

Re:Good

[AmiMoJo]

He is crazy. Look at this statement:

public safety had to be balanced with privacy concerns

These are the SAME THING. If you weaken encryption people become less safe from those who want to invade their privacy and steal their data.They become more vulnerable to criminals and oppressive governments.

He seems to live in a fantasy world where there are good guys and bad guys and magical thinking actually works.

Re: Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for it transforms millions of targets into a single target, protected by someone else's incompetence.

Re:Good

[b0s0z0ku]

Until the Chinese and Russian governments demand keys to ALL Apple devices, because devices sold outside their countries MIGHT be imported and used in China or Russia.

Or the US government demands to hold keys to devices sold worldwide for the same reason. People living outside the US shouldn't be subject to the US's whims and caprices either.

Re:Good

[Immerman]

>And the key storage would be as secure as the primary key storage you're currently using, so there is no additional vulnerability there either.

Of course there is. Primary key storage is done by *you* - the only way anyone can get access to your device is to target you specifically, and manage to determine your personal key.

Secondary "back door" key storage is done by the government, and used regularly by them if it offers any actual value - and thus there are likely hundreds, if not thousands of individuals with legitimate access to that key. And the moment any *one* of them is subverted - be it by bribe, blackmail, the temptation of the enormous black-market value of that key, or just plain old incompetence, *everyone* loses any real security on their phone. People are after all almost always the weakest link in any halfway decent security system.

Not to mention, one of the prime "bad actors" encryption protects against are the "legitimate" authorities, who have a long rack record of abusing their power - encrypting phones became popular in large part in response to the revelations of illegal government surveillance programs.

Re: Good

[joemck]

Another point is I don't trust the government to keep my escrowed key safe. Leaks happen, hacks happen. The more places my secrets are stored, the more danger there is of them being stolen. And when it happens, I won't know, and even if I find out I have no recourse other than throwing away my device and going back to a normal PC where I can install proper, non key escrow encryption software.

Re:Good

[Voyager529]

Oh, this chestnut again. Let's review what actually happened...

Apple ignored a Federal warrant requiring them to assist in accessing a phone used by a dead terrorist.

No, they didn't. They provided law enforcement with the data they had - iCloud data, keychain contents...whatever data they actually-had, they handed over. What the government wanted was for Apple to write a firmware update that would enable the FBI to brute force the passcode requirement and push it to the phone. The reason there was all kinds of fanfare was because the FBI was trying to compel Apple to write software that didn't exist, for the sake of reducing security that everybody, everywhere, ever, knew was not going to be used in just this one singular case.

They claimed it would cost them to much money and tie up too many resources.

Well, yes. Writing software takes time and money, from intelligent humans. Apple doesn't have a central database of passcodes camping out on a Macbook in Tim Cook's office in Cupertino that they were simply refusing to query.

They claimed their security was so good that even they might not be able to retrieve any data from the phone.

Well, if Apple wrote firmware that worked well enough on their test unit, but ended up failing on the phone of interest for whatever reason, would the FBI have been okay with that? Or would Apple have been liable for obstruction of justice? Only a fool would give any form of guarantee.

They used the entire episode to showcase their commitment to a users privacy.

The way this is written, it sounds like it's intended to be derogatory...but I really don't see a downside to such a commitment.

In other words they used their actions to sell more devices.

You have a dizzying intellect. People want phones that are secure. The FBI indicates they are having trouble unlocking the phone. The FBI brings the issue to the court of public opinion. Apple affirms that their devices are so secure, the FBI has to compel them to write software that doesn't exist in order to maybe-kinda-sorta get access to it. People trust Apple more, and buy more phones as a result due to their security. Welcome to how capitalism is supposed to work.

And a couple of days later they ended up getting a big kick in the nuts as a third party proved Apples vaunted security technology was complete bullshit.

Well, that's quite a leap there. Third parties have *always* managed to find a vulnerability in iOS. Take a look at the history of jailbreaking; time and time again iOS has fallen given enough poking and prodding. If an Israeli company managed to successfully exploit a vulnerability as a last ditch effort, that's far different than Apple using their software developers and their signing keys to write software they did not want to write, at the behest of their own government officials, who would have ended up using the incident to cement into case law the ability of the FBI to require work to be done by private companies in order to meet their own ends.

Now, if you want to take it one step further...how come the last thing we heard from the case was that the Israeli company unlocked the phone? If there was any useful data at all on that phone, you KNOW the FBI would have been shouting from the rooftops how they arrested a dozen more terrorists because of what was on the phone, and how Apple got in the way. Instead, we heard nothing thereafter. If Apple was full of it with respect to their security argument, then the FBI was ten times worse and they never owned up to being wrong.

But hey, everyone has Graykey now, so you win.

Re:Good

[SoftwareArtist]

public safety had to be balanced with privacy concerns

In some ways he's right about this: there are situations where you really do need to balance one against the other. And that's the whole problem. The FBI, NSA, etc. decided it was up to them where to strike the balance, which of course meant giving themselves as much power as possible. And since they knew a lot of rabble rousing citizens wouldn't agree with their decisions, they went to huge lengths to hide what they were doing (and are still doing). If you keep your actions secret, you don't have to worry about anyone criticizing you.

By doing that, they betrayed democracy. If a balance has to be struck between safety and privacy, it's up to the people to decide where to strike it. Not the police. Not the government. And the people can only make that decision through a fully informed public debate. The FBI and NSA didn't want a public debate, so they just did what they wanted and slapped "top secret" on everything to keep the people from finding out. By doing that, they made themselves into the bad guys. And they will remain the bad guys until they come clean about everything they have done, and accept that it's up to the people, not up to themselves, to decide where to strike the balance.

nuts

[e**(i pi)-1]

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.

Re:nuts

[Rob Y.]

Do you really think strong encryption keeps your phone from being 'hacked'. All it does - and all it's supposed to do - is keep someone in possession of your phone from reading its contents without unlocking it. But once you've unlocked your phone and the OS is running, any malware you've got on it has no problem reading all your data, stealing your bank account, etc.

Now I'm not saying that it's not a good thing to have your phone encrypted - and strongly so. But let's not pretend that law enforcement - or even bad government actors - are the same thing as your everyday fraudsters that are able to steal your info just fine with the best encryption Apple can provide. Encryption does not protect your from OS bugs and malware that you installed and granted access to your device.

Google it

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

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.

He's right

[Tyrannosaur]

"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.

Comey...

[ooloorie]

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.

Re:Comey...

[Anonymous Coward]

Saying Hillary was under investigation 11 days before an election was hardly helping her. Democrats are all oh so mad about that. He was just point out a possible upside.

He seems motivated by a personal code of morality that is intentionally oblivious to political reality.

Re:Comey...

[ooloorie]

Comey is the one who brought up the emails a week or two before the election

Yes, and he has personally stated why. He didn't do it to hurt Clinton, he did it because he assumed she was going to win and thought it would help her to deal with this before her coronation.

Comey was a major reason why Clinton lost the election. She was leading by a wide margin before Comey stuck his oar in.

Hillary lost because she was a lying, incompetent, corrupt psychopath with no charisma, no political skills, and no redeeming qualities: she caused life-long Democrats like myself to leave the party in disgust.

Polls showed her leading all the way until election day; the polls were simply wrong. Probably a lot of people who hated her hung up on pollsters, like I did. Why help these people manipulate me?

Re:Comey should be grateful to Trump

[quantaman]

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.

Works both ways

[denbesten]

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.

Re:Comey should be grateful to Trump

[quantaman]

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.

James Comey is/was basically a cop

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.

Consider when personal comp started.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.)

LEA already doing a spectacular job

[WaffleMonster]

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...

Re:"A Higher Loyalty"? The sounds a lot like treas

[toadlife]

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.

Re:Irony: liberals loving America's secret police

[dev-in-seattle]

We liberals don't worship Comey, etc. We just see that they are trying to do the right thing in a very difficult circumstance. The easy thing is just go away. The hard thing is to stand up for what's right. In this case, the right thing is to speak honestly about Trump and the horrible behavior of the republican party, the part that is trying to justify trump as normal behavior and totally legal and fine.

summarized

[Reverend Green]

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.

Re:Forrest Gump of the FBI

[stealth_finger]

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.

Comey Lacks Perspective.

[hduff]

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.