FBI director attacks tech companies for embracing new modes of encryption

The FBI director, James Comey, speaks about the impact of technology on law enforcement in Washington on Thursday. Photograph: Jose Luis Magana/AP

The director of the FBI savaged tech companies for their recent embrace of end-to-end encryption and suggested rewriting laws to ensure law enforcement access to customer data in a speech on Thursday.

James Comey said data encryption such as that employed on Apples latest mobile operating system would deprive police and intelligence companies of potentially life-saving information, even when judges grant security agencies access through a warrant.

Criminals and terrorists would like nothing more than for us to miss out, he said. Technologists have found such statements reminiscent of the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, an earlier period in which the US government warned about encryption constraining law enforcement.

Framing his speech at the Brookings Institution as kickstarting a dialogue and insisting he was not a scaremonger, Comey said encryption threatens to lead us all to a very, very dark place.

Comey also posed as a question whether companies not subject currently to Calea should be required to build lawful intercept capabilities for law enforcement, something he contended would not expand FBI authorities. Calea is a 1994 surveillance law mandating that law enforcement and intelligence agencies have access to telecommunications data, which Comey described as archaic in the face of technological innovation.

Im hoping we can now start a dialogue with Congress on updating it, Comey said.

Privacy advocates contend Comey is demagoguing the issue.

It took a June supreme court ruling, they point out, for law enforcement to abandon its contention that it did not require warrants at all to search through smartphones or tablets, and add that technological vulnerabilities can be exploited by hackers and foreign intelligence agencies as well as the US government. Additionally, the FBI and police retain access to data saved remotely in the so-called cloud where much data syncs for storage from devices like Apples for which companies like Apple keep the encryption keys.

Comey, frequently referring to bad guys using encryption, argued access to the cloud is insufficient.

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FBI director attacks tech companies for embracing new modes of encryption