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.  
See the article here:
FBI Director: Encryption Will Lead to a 'Very Dark Place'