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The FBI's director says the agency is collecting data that he will present next year in hopes of sparking a national conversation about law enforcement's increasing inability to access encrypted electronic devices.
Speaking on Friday at the American Bar Association conference in San Francisco, James Comey says the agency was unable to access 650 of 5,000 electronic devices investigators attempted to search over the last 10 months.
Comey says encryption technology makes it impossible in a growing number of cases to search electronic devices. He says it's up to U.S. citizens to decide whether to modify the technology.
Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fbi-chief-calls-national-talk-over-encryption-vs-safety-n624101
(Score: 2) by gidds on Tuesday August 09 2016, @12:22PM
I don't think we're the intended audience for this. In fact, he probably wants to keep techies out of things as much as possible.
What he wants is to be able to stand up and say "We've held a full public consultation, and most people are in favour of restricting encryption so that we can keep them safe." Then TPTB will have clear, ethical grounds for doing what they want.
And the best way of being able to (honestly) say that is to have the consultation on their terms, with the argument framed in their way. If they can engage as many non-techies as possible, then they'll be able to scare them with all sorts of worrying-sounding stories and claims (probably involving terrorism, pædophiles, and/or whatever the next Big Scary Thing turns out to be), and the listeners won't know enough to disclaim them.
So what can we do? I guess the best way to foil that is to educate people. Or at least, convince them that security and privacy are good, and that removing them has risks.
As I've said before, what we're missing is concrete examples. Simple scenarios that you can explain in a few words, demonstrating those risks. Saying "But the gummint can read your emails!" doesn't cut it any more, because in most cases, that won't have any direct ill effects that people can see. (And because people don't seriously distrust TPTB now, they can't seriously imagine a time when they would.) Most of the discussion about security and privacy is too abstract, too hypothetical, and people often don't relate to that. We need people to feel the dangers, to understand them at a gut level, in a dramatic, obvious, personal way.
We also need to demonstrate clearly that restricting encryption won't really have the desired effect of keeping people safer, either.
If we can come up with strong enough examples of the risks, and spread them widely enough, then there may be a chance of heading this off. But it needs to be clearer, more direct, and more personal than "But... surveillance is baaad, mmmkay?".
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