The FBI director thinks tech experts who can't comply with his impossible demands just aren't trying hard enough
As reported by The Intercept, Comey spoke at Senate Judiciary and Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on Wednesday about strong encryption, around which there is an ongoing and increasingly bitter debate between tech companies and the US and UK governments.
Strong encryption refers to the act of scrambling messages or data in such a way that they are impossible to understand without the correct key or password. Even law enforcement with a warrant can't decrypt them, or the maker of the encryption software.
The technology is being increasingly implemented by tech companies like Apple and WhatsApp following government spying revelations fr exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden - frustrating law enforcement, who fear that large amounts of communications data they once had access to is "going dark."
However, security experts counter, it is impossible to implement backdoors in encryption products without leaving them liable to abuse by criminals, hackers, and foreign spies. Besides consumer communications, strong encryption is also used to secure a vast array of online activities, including bank security and transferring confidential government information.
Earlier this week, a group of leading cryptographers and security experts published a paper damning proposals for back doors in encryption."The costs would be substantial, the damage to innovation severe, and the consequences to economic growth difficult to predict," it says. Bruce Schneier, one of the paper's authors, told me that even trying to implement back doors would "destroy the internet."
Comey told the Intelligence Committee on Wednesday that "a whole lot of good people have said it's too hard … maybe that's so ... But my reaction to that is: I'm not sure they've really tried."