FBI Director James Comey looks on during a news conference at the bureau's Salt Lake City office on Aug. 19, 2014, in Salt Lake City.
Image: AP Photo/Rick Bowmer/Associated Press
By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai2014-10-16 17:20:27 UTC
FBI Director James Comey says the spread of encryption, aided by Apple and Google's new security measures, will lead to "a very dark place" where police might not be able to stop criminals.
To avoid that, tech companies need to cooperate and build surveillance-friendly systems when police comes knocking at their door, Comey said on Thursday during a speech in Washington, his first major speech since becoming director last year.
"If the challenges of real-time interception threaten to leave us in the dark, encryption threatens to lead all of us to a very dark place," Comey said during his speech at the Brookings Institution titled "Going Dark: Are Technology, Privacy and Public Safety on a Collision Course?"
The solution, Comey said, is to expand a 1990s-era law to emcompass Internet companies like Google or Apple. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (commonly known as CALEA), currently compels telecommunication companies such as Verizon or AT&T to build systems that can be wiretapped. The law, however, doesn't cover companies like Google, Facebook or Apple.
"Ideally, I'd like to see CALEA written so that a communications provider has an obligation to build a lawful intercept capability into the product that they provide, not that we hold some universal key," Comey said. "We need our private sector partners to take a step back, to change course. We need them to do the right thing."
For civil liberties advocates, as well as technologists, Comey's proposal amounts to asking companies to build "backdoors" into their systems which, they worry, could be exploited by hackers and cybercriminals alike.
Backdoors, as Columbia University computer science professor Steven Bellovin once said, are "a disaster waiting to happen" because it's technically impossible to build a backdoor that can be used solely by law enforcement agencies.
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FBI Director: Encryption Will Lead to a 'Very Dark Place'