You know the drill, right? The FBI keeps insisting that it has a "going dark" problem due to encryption making it impossible to access key evidence of supposedly criminal behavior, in theory allowing crime to happen without recourse. The problem, though, is that nearly every single bit of this claim is false. It's kind of stunning.
- It appears that, in practice, the FBI almost never runs into encryption.
- In the rare cases where it has (and we don't know how many because since the FBI admitted it over exaggerated how many "locked" devices it had, and then has since refused to provide an updated count), there do appear to be ways to get into those devices anyway.
- But the key issue, by far, is that the opposite of going dark is happening. Thanks to our increasingly electronic lives, the government actually has way more access to information than ever before.
Two recent articles highlight this in practice, with regards to the FBI trying to track down the rare cases of criminal activity happening around some of the protests.
(Score: 1) by AHuxley on Wednesday June 24 2020, @01:50AM
The wider smartphone population was never to work out what the NSA and GCHQ could do.
That tech is now at a cost that the FBI can use the same nation wide smartphone collection methods.
Then city and state police can afford the tech.
The idea of "going dark" was to get the domestic message out that the collection tech was not in wide use and that every next generation of smartphone was beyond the skill set on non mil collection.