Agents at the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have been unable to extract data from nearly 7,000 mobile devices they have tried to access, the agency's director has said.Let's be honest about this: There is no way to build in a secure "back door" into any encryption product. If one were built in, then it would either be exploited by hackers or the FBI's hacking tool would leak, just like the NSA's did.
Christopher Wray said encryption on devices was "a huge, huge problem" for FBI investigations.
To assume, as the FBI apparently does, that they could design a back-door into encryption that nobody else would be able to figure out is the height of arrogance. But let's call it what it is: They are openly lying if they even hint that they could do it.
Do you want the FBI having the ability to remotely snoop around inside your phone, which probably holds more personal data about you than any other device that you have?
4 comments:
Exactly why I will never put my Proof of Insurance card on my phone...
"Sure Officer, you can take my unlocked phone with you back to your car to check this Proof of Insurance..."
Read that: they don't care if we have effective, workable encryption, and would rather we didn't.
-Doug in Oakland
They're going to have to drag an encryption back door out of Apple and Google's radioactive corpses, because back doors are bad for business. Any back door that lets the FBI in also lets in everybody else, including business competitors. That's what thus far has held back the forces who want back doors.
I never even thought of putting a Proof of Insurance card on my phone. I guess that's one advantage of being old -- you don't cater to new-fangled (but stupid) ideas.
It's hard to overstate just how angry the computer security community was over PRISM and the rest. These are smart people, and they felt betrayed. And then they got to work, and here we are. I wrote about this some time back:
https://borepatch.blogspot.com/2013/11/google-security-engineer-on-nsa-spying.html
For a long time a bunch of us in the security community thought that while the NSA was a big bureaucracy, they were the Good Guys. Then we found out what they were doing to us. I guess I'm a little surprised that the FBI d00d doesn't know this.
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