FBI Director James Comey isn’t backing down from his position that Apple and Google are wrong to encrypt customer smartphone data preventing law enforcement agencies the possibility of access if requested. After last month sharing that the FBI was in talks with the two companies to discuss concerns with marketing devices as being inaccessible to third-parties including the government, the FBI Director spoke with CBS News in an interview where he continued to make the case against such encryption…
In the interview, Comey repeated past remarks smartphone encryption is being used as a marketing tool that puts people “beyond the law”:
The notion that we would market devices that would allow someone to place themselves beyond the law, troubles me a lot. As a country, I don’t know why we would want to put people beyond the law.
As we’ve mentioned before, Apple CEO Tim Cook recently said the company couldn’t provide iPhone data to the government even with a subpoena. “It’s encrypted and we don’t have the key,” Cook explained. FBI Director Comey likened smartphone encryption to selling vehicles and houses that law enforcement couldn’t access.
That is, sell cars with trunks that couldn’t ever be opened by law enforcement with a court order, or sell an apartment that could never be entered even by law enforcement. Would you want to live in that neighborhood? This is a similar concern.
While both Apple and Google are each using operating system encryption as a privacy tool to allow customers to feel safer with carrying sensitive data, the FBI Director described instances of terrorism and kidnapping when law enforcement would benefit from accessing a lock smartphone.
The notion that people have devices, again, that with court orders, based on a showing of probable cause in a case involving kidnapping or child exploitation or terrorism, we could never open that phone? My sense is that we’ve gone too far when we’ve gone there.
Comey isn’t the only government official publicly lobbying Apple and Google to reconsider smartphone encryption. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder last month expressed a similar position saying “It is fully possible to permit law enforcement to do its job while still adequately protecting personal privacy.”
You can view the CBS News interview with FBI Director James Comey above (the Apple and Google remarks come in shortly after the 7 minute mark).
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Well, of course he’d say that. It’s his job to be able to know everything that happens on American soil – and being locked out of something as full of “useful information” as a smartphone is deeply troubling for the government.
Sadlymthis is a lie, this is only a show, after Snowden showed to the world we are being spied 24/7 by the fbi, nsa, and cia, now they have to pretend that they cannot access your phone. It is a very big bad lie from apple
“Waaahhhhh! Smartphones are smarter than we are!”
– That is what this guy sounds like…
“Apple and Google are wrong to encrypt customer smartphone data preventing law enforcement agencies the possibility of access if requested”
If requested – They already read all our e-mail, listen to our phone calls and intercept out texts – without any court orders – all in the name of Homeland Security The Government has already TAKEN to many of our rights away from us – so to this I call bullshit.
Suck It Washington – and don’t pull out the Terrorist / Child Molester / Child Pornographer cards. You want it all with out any reason – except you think you can!
That’s it government…. Keep pushing the people around and watch when they push back. The U.S. has watched other countries revolot…..they should realize it could happen here as well.
They should but they don’t. Sadly, many, if not most of our politicians aren’t that bright. People forget that one of the reasons for the second amendment was for the governed to rid themselves of a corrupt government.
Boo f-ing hoo. Cry me a river.
“That is, sell cars with trunks that couldn’t ever be opened by law enforcement with a court order, or sell an apartment that could never be entered even by law enforcement. Would you want to live in that neighborhood?”…..yes I would. Sounds like a pretty safe neighborhood.
Agreed. He’s out of touch. Use other means to find your prey, do not expect us to give up our right to privacy. They’ve just never been faced with a situation in which the thing they wanted to access was inaccessible – they need to get over it.
Not to mention the fact that the cops actually aren’t supposed to have a court order or probable cause to do either of those things, but in fact *regularly* do both without.
How many times do the cops just stop people and tell them to open the trunk even though it’s illegal? How many times do they come to someones house and ask to be let in, even though it’s illegal?
*are supposed …
That guy has won my respect, simply for the expression of his principles. I, for one, believe he is sincere. But when it comes to data encryption, I say to him – suck it up, buttercup! Find a different way to solve the puzzle.
Umm, the FBI doesn’t have keys to someone’s car nor house, even with a court order. It’s up to the owner to allow them access or for them to break in. Same as an encrypted phone.
This guy needs to realize that the law works FOR the people. He works FOR the people. All the people.
A better analogy is access to your brain. Because the contents of a phone are an extension of what’s in your head for most people. Sorry, stay the fuck out.
I hope Apple and Google take this opportunity to push this issue to a head, doubling down on encryption efforts and eventually take action all the way to the Supreme Court. As a bonus, having senior law enforcement officials forced to resign over this issue would be nice to see too.
Exactly! Brain analogy is perfect. Of course, if the’d never waterboard us into divulging what’s in our brains would they? nah, never…
With his same argument when could defend the use of torture on people to obtain information locked in their memory. And why don’t we do that? Because there are other rights, and we do take each individual case and balance the pros and cons to find the right approach. That’s how we came to the conclusion that it’s not worth torturing people and how we should come to the same conclusion that it’s not because of a few rare instances where access is needed that we should give it.
I can see how the encryption will thwart law enforcement, but after all the abuses, I don’t see the people trusting the government enough to allow them the right. This has been going on forever, got worse with the patriot act, and this is the backlash the government should have seen coming BEFORE it trampled on the 4th amendment.They know their crimes are eventually made public and should have expected this. Physics isn’t the only place where “every action has an equal and opposite reaction” holds true
Really a great Read: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/10/02/the-nsa-and-me/
“The NSA and Me By James Bamford”
If there is a court order that is between law enforcement and the person who has the phone they are investigating. Not Apple or Google. If said person refuses to allow access to their phone then they are in contempt. Lock them up.
That could be a 5th Amendment violation – You cannot be forced to incriminate yourself.
The US government has clearly overstepped its boundaries by huge amounts and deserves these pushbacks from AAPL, GOOG, and VZ. VZ some years ago refused the govt’s request for a back door into VZ’s servers, but the govt got in anyway through T because of VZ peer to peer arrangements with T (see Bamford, The Shadow Factory, pp 179-191).
My worry now is the govt lulling us into a false sense of security because they actually know how to break these encryptions.
Also, keep in mind that foreign governments and private companies snoop on our communications.
I don’t mean to sound like an expert here, I’m not. I believe that spying is one of the lowest occupations.
Another title for this interview could have been “FBI Director James Comey and the world of faulty analogies”.
Here is how that analogy should have been stated Mr. Comey.
“That is, sell cars with trunks that don’t provide law enforcement with a set of keys that will open all trunks, or sell an apartment without providing law enforcement with a master key to allow access to every apartment at any time. Would you want to live in that neighborhood?”
Just as with a trunk of a car or a house. A warrant allows them to either have the owner open it or they can break in. It is EXACTLY the same now with smartphones. Before it was like every lock manufacturer had to provide law enforcement with a key to a person’s house or car any time they made a request. And the worst part is that too many of those request were granted by secret courts to secret law enforcement and the lack companies were not allowed by law to tell the car or house owner that a copy of their key was handed over to law enforcement.
So, suck it up Mr. Comey. The citizens of the US are deciding where they want the balance of law, and if you aren’t capable of doing your job without trampling on people’s privacy rights then you need to quit so we can find someone competent to do your job.
Exactly! His analogy doesn’t make sense. Yours is spot on.
Analogy police, anyone?
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2006-01-22/
It’s not the job of a company to allow the government to run amuck with personal data. Next they’ll want to force home automation companies to give access to in home cameras. Screw that.
They can crack it with their gear, period. It just takes time. So what he really wants is the ability to decrypt ALL of it so they can monitor everyone in real time. You’d be a fool to think they wouldn’t use that when the want or feel the need without a court order.
This is a very slippy slope, and we live in the land of the free. The court order should give them access, not free decryption.
The encryption isn’t the issue here anyway, most people, including the had of the FBI are completely missing the point. The US justice system needs some reforms to reflect the reality of life today in a digital world. Cell phones and other personal computers and data must cal under the protections of the 5th Amendment in the US, and similar protections against self-incrimination elsewhere, regardless of whether those devices are encrypted or not.
“beyond the law”
that the director of the FBI says something like this is extremely worrying.
There is no “beyond the law”. You either respect it or you break it. People encrypting their phones are not breaking the law, period.
Remember this fact, folks:
“Encrypting the data stored on your phone, as Apple and Google allow you to do, is pretty much only useful when the person trying to break in — in this case, the police — physically has your phone.
It doesn’t stop cops or spies from collecting your phone’s metadata: who you call and when. It doesn’t prevent them from eavesdropping on your phone calls or reading regular text messages. It doesn’t stop them from tracking your physical location whenever you carry your phone. It doesn’t stop them from reading your email or digging through your Facebook account. And as I’ve noted before, if you use cloud storage services like iCloud, it doesn’t even stop them from looking at photos and you’ve taken, who’s on your contact list, and all sorts of other data.”
— micah.lee@theintercept.com
Complete article is at:
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/10/09/police-act-furious-encrypted-phones-still-love-heres/
As a Conservative Republican, I made the foolish mistake or surrendering freedom in the name of safety via the Patriot Act after 9/11. Well, I don’t plan to make that mistake again. WE (the people) no longer trust YOU (the government, any and all parties). It’s up to you to re-earn that trust, and this isn’t how you do it. Just because I don’t have anything to hide doesn’t give you the right to look through it without my permission.
I’m both liberal and conservative, but neither democrat nor republican, you’d probably need some Dramamine before hearing my ‘diverse’ political opinions, but liberals, keep in mind that getting our fourth amendment rights trampled the way the government is doing and is whining about losing the ability to do due to Apple and (laughably) Google protecting our privacy with encryption to which they don’t have a key is one of the main reasons for the second amendment… for the governed to be able rid itself of a corrupt government. Politics has become a synonym for corruption. Don’t throw away freedoms now that you might need in the future.
I’m a liberal and I would have to agree with your sentiments. However, I was always against trampling on freedoms. Glad to see both sides of the aisle agree on something. We ban build on that.
Presumably FBI Director James Comey gives a set of the keys to his house with his local police force, for the same reason?
What an offing hypocrite!
I wish someone would get him fired or force him to step down.
Of course the FBI and other Government agencies are making their case that encryption is bad based on the old “if you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear” argument. Of course that’s crap, as we know that those in power abuse it constantly.
There is also the premise that we are subject to them and the ever increasing notion that we are all the property of the state, which again is also wrong.
The fact that I was born in a particular country does not make me property of that country and I see no reason why the government of any country I was born in (and of course a government of one where I was not) should have access to anything of mine because they choose to.
Should I be guilty of a crime, or suspected of a crime, then the investigating agency can take up any matter of encryption with me directly, and they should obtain a warrant specifically to give them access by following due process, in the same way that they should obtain a warrant to search my house.
We all know that in any event that they use our phones to figure out where we are, where we’ve been, who we contact, who contacts us, they read our email, they know what web sites we access.
Meanwhile, I applaud the efforts of Apple and Google in preventing a state assuming a right that I did not ever give them.
Any back door that an be used by the FBI and Apple can also be used by Russian and Chinese data pirates. Suck it, all of you.
Hello everyone,
may I ask everyone who is for encryption whether he is ready to utterly consistent in this position even in a situation where for example HIS OWN little kid would be kidnapped and the only possible track for police would be encrypted iPhone? Also if anyone decides to respond that decryption is still possible, it is only a matter of time, then from what I have been able to glean so far, it might take up to several years with today’s typical equipment which looks like a way too long to be of any use in the effort to save such a poor kid. Whoever is ready to go to such lengths in upholding his convictions has my respect for being a man of true consistency.
I’m really not sure that any kidnapper would be dumb enough to store the location of where they had hidden said kidnap victim on their phone. Perhaps on a sketch of the area with a hand drawn map and a big X with the word “hideout” on it?
But if you knew the kidnappers cell or the victims cell then they can be triangulated and the historical location retrieved from the cell phone company regardless of any encryption on the phone.
So I don’t understand why having the contents of the phone encrypted makes a difference?
The ‘agencies’ already have access to triangulation data via cell sites, call info, email info, web info etc – why do the contents of the phone matter?
Not sure about anywhere else but legislation already exists in the UK at least, so that if I encrypt something, lets say some text with PGP for example (a weak example I realise as PGP is believed to have been had a long time ago) but refuse to had over the private key/decrypt key to the authorities I will go to prison for a very long time.
The law doesn’t prevent me from doing so though, and I fail to see why having an encrypted phone is any different other than that possibly they already have a backdoor into PGP or can easily break it, but an encrypted phone according to Apple, is a lot more difficult.
Hello Phil C Parry,
thank you for your response. Well, I have not made any particular claim along the line that kidnapper would store location of kids in his phone. What I mean are hundreds of possible generic scenarios where phone might contain just just that bit of evidence that would enable police to rescue the kid and catch the perpetrators of crime (just have a look at many investigation stories where discovery of perpetrators hanged on a single bit of information that ultimately mattered). So for example what about a situation where police recovers an iPhone after open fire exchange with a suspect on the run who died being mortally shot. He will then never share encryption keys with them even if he would want to (and we may suppose he will not want to if the survives). So it is up to them to decrypt the device (the device might contain pieces of information needed to uncover and convict a pedophile network) but with the new settings by Apple the decryption has become unrealistically demanding given the resources the law enforcement agencies normally have at their disposal. Now I myself being a father of three little kinds cannot personally hold a proencryption stance in a consistent fashion so I do not support it as of today. I want the police to be able to protect the victims and go after criminals in a way that is realistic in timing when compared to the span of human life. I see it as ironic that the new encryption setting will do nothing to prevent NSA spying (which is related to network communication) but will hinder actual fight with crime where recovered physical evidence often matters a lot. Still, if there are consistent proencryption folks out there, I can respect then, Have a nice day.
The government brought this upon itself. If it has not broken the law this wouldn’t be an issue. You’re just using the same abused child card that the government is using. You’re not even being original. Go hang your head in shame.
Hello mpias3785,
I am not copying nor repeating anyone since as far as I am aware, no one has asked the question the way I framed it. If you are among those fully consistent proencryption folks, than I can respect your convictions even if I possibly disagree with them. Have a nice day.
This is completely typical Americanified paranoia at play here.
Look at all the comments about the 2nd amendment, law, privacy, spying, corrupt government blah blah blah.
Americans, please, try to just pass about your daily lives and leave law enforcement to the professionals.
If they want access to your phone – then just give it to them ffs, I promise you, nothing you have is worth anything at all to anyone.
So many wannabe-celebrities thinking what they have is worth something.
But this concept, along with selling of guns, is something one can never argue about with the typical American, because they’re so brainwashed!
Study our history. It’s quite different then that of Europe. Our constitution and its amendments are important. If they weren’t many European countries wouldn’t have based theirs on ours. As an outsider your opinion means nothing here. As the second smallest continent and with more countries then we have states, get your own shit together before condemning us.
Wasn’t there a similar upset in the gouvernment about PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) incryption in the 1990s?