FBI director: Unbreakable encryption is a “huge, huge problem”

Well, to be fair, it <i>is</i> a huge problem for the director of the FBI. His job is to investigate potential crimes by gathering lots of evidence and doing lots of analysis. The popularity of encryption is making it increasingly difficult for him to gather the evidence that he needs.<p>The problem (for him) is that encryption is a tremendous help to everyone else, and we don&#x27;t (yet?) have a way to protect our data from criminals and from overzealous or corrupt cops, without also deterring legitimate investigations.

If chainsaws were used in a mass killing, should we ban chainsaws? Or how about scissors?<p>Saying police and government agencies &quot;need&quot; to have master keys to every building, network and endpoint is insane. This is the fascist Clipper chip redux. The potential for abuse is beyond the pale for an open society. As such an open society must accept some edge-case vulnerabilities (ie criminals using crypto) in order to avoid becoming a censored, totalitarian fiefdom where dissent is crushed by the wide powers of intelligence services that have a panopticon into everyone&#x27;s lives, 1984-style.

Devil&#x27;s Advocate — in the entire history of US law, if police can convince a judge that they have a good enough reason, judge can give the cops permission to break into your house, your bedroom, your diary, your safety deposit box, the safe you buried in your shed ... a judge always had the choice to decide whether or not cops get to invade your privacy.<p>For the first time, ever, strong encryption changes that paradigm. Personally, I&#x27;m still in favor of it, but it really is a very fundamental game-changer.

This just in: FBI is annoyed by how easy it is for criminals to use paper shredders, wear hats around cameras, and whisper in rooms with microphones.<p>But that doesn&#x27;t mean these things should be stopped.

For better or worse, so much of our lives are conducted through and recorded by our phones and computers that they are now highly valuable black boxes for post-incident criminal investigations.<p>It&#x27;s a shame that encryption makes it harder for them to jack into the accused&#x27;s consciousness and simply download some assortment of digital artifacts out of context that can be used to build a narrative against them. Used to be you had to go out and hunt for evidence, but modern investigators prefer to sit back and fish for evidence once it comes to them.<p>Plus there&#x27;s the value of things like your contacts list...for OC cases, it&#x27;s a helpful collection of nodes and edges for their graph.<p>They also lose the ability to see what extracurricular proclivities you&#x27;ve been up to. Anything licentious you&#x27;ve ever (or <i>have</i> ever) done will be used to gain leverage over other potential witnesses or simply demonize you in court. God help you if you&#x27;re embezzling money while carrying on an affair, or you&#x27;re a furry simply accused of a sex crime.<p>Our digital lives betray the fifth amendment. Even if you won&#x27;t testify against yourself, the contents of your phone&#x2F;computer will tell <i>everything</i>...unless it&#x27;s encrypted. It&#x27;s the last defense against self-incrimination that we have in this era.

You need to weight the law enforcement need for encryption against the security threat of hackers stealing your data. Hackers including foreign state-sponsored hackers appear to be a major threat. People need the tools to protect their data.

The inability to read minds, is a &quot;huge, huge problem&quot;