Tuesday, July 31, 2018

More On The Decline And Fall Of The ACLU

posted by Winston Smith at 8:24 AM

1 Comments:

Blogger Dark Avenger said...

Having a backdoor for cellular and other devices is a fools task.

The rise of smartphones has seen users replace their houses with handheld devices as the primary storage for a life's-worth of documents, along with access to a great deal of financial and personal info. Device makers want to ensure a stolen phone doesn't mean a stolen life. Wray (and others) don't want to do anything more than obtain warrants to scrape the digital innards of devices they seize. In other words, when the FBI encounters a locked safe in someone's house, Wray would believe it's the manufacturer's fault for the safe failing to unlock immediately in the presence of a search warrant.
Still, Wray believes society as a whole would be better off with weaker encryption because sometimes terrorists and criminals use encryption.
Because to the extent that the bad guys have shifted more and more to living their whole lives through encrypted devices and encrypted messaging platforms, that if we don't find a way to access that information with lawful process, we're in a bad place as a country.
Default encryption has been around for a few years now and there's no evidence we're less safe as a nation. Very few prosecutions have been dead-ended because investigators couldn't get into a phone. The problem is presented as swiftly-growing and inevitable, but there's been nothing delivered as evidence of these claims. The FBI has continually pointed to its growing pile of locked devices as Exhibit A in the War on Encryption, but has never presented anything at all to give these claims of diminishing public safety any credence. All we know for sure at this point is the FBI can't count. It used a wrong number (~7,800) to push the narrative and still expects us to believe it after it admitted this count was nearly four times higher than the actual number of devices in its possession.
Wray needs to stop complaining about the tech sector until his own agency can demonstrate its ability to approach the issue with facts, verified numbers, and intellectual honesty.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180721/12074340282/fbi-boss-chris-wray-we-put-man-moon-so-why-not-encryption-backdoors.shtml

9:39 AM  

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