FBI director: Greatest threat from terror since 9/11

Speaking before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, FBI Director James Comey said Obama – who referred to Clinton’s use of the private server as “a mistake” during an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” – is
not privy to how the bureau’s
inquiry is proceeding.

Our world, with respect to violent crime, is a world that was hard to imagine twenty-five years ago, and a whole lot of hard work went into getting us historically peaceful America.

“I think there are device manufacturers who include that (encryption) in why their products should be used” Comey said, to which Cornyn responded “You said encryption is par of terrorist trade craft-correct?” In fact, he said, government and the tech industry all want the same thing-to keep Americans secure. And I was saying that in the context of a worrisome spike in homicide in over 30 of the nation’s top 50 cities that’s occurred this year.

Although he declined to discuss the specifics of the investigations into the Paris and San Bernardino attacks, Comey noted that one of the shooters in the Garland, Texas, attack on a contest to draw a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed exchanged 109 encrypted messages with overseas terrorists.

Comey took issue with critics – many of them eminent technologists – who said that building in a method to assure access to encrypted communications would unacceptably undermine security. “We’re not asking for the key, just let us in with a court order”.

Comey acknowledged that encrypted apps would still exist. “But the government hopes to get to a place where if a judge issues an order, the company figures out how to supply that information to the judge and figures out on its own the best way to do that”. “The government shouldn’t be telling people how to operate their systems”. “There are plenty of companies today that provide secure services to their customers and still comply with court orders”. And a representative of numerous large tech companies recently remarked: “Weakening security with the aim of advancing security simply does not make sense”. As a report by Open Technology Institute released yesterday stated: “When it comes to encryption, the horse is out of the barn, the ship has sailed, and the toothpaste isn’t going back in the tube. We have no idea what he said because those messages were encrypted”, said Comey.

“It is a business model question”, he said. The problem we face post-Snowden is it’s moved from being available to the sophisticated bad guy to being the default. Some services-like most flavors of webmail-currently don’t use end-to-end encryption, so they won’t have to change.

“That is a big problem”, Comey said.

“When we find terrorist related material, we look for and remove associated violating content and accounts”, said a Facebook spokesperson.