Wray opened his anti-encryption discourse last week at a cybersecurity conference in New York. In short, encryption is essentially dangerous. And the FBI boss will obviously continue to complain about encryption without suggesting any solutions.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation was incapable to access data from nearly 7,800 machines in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 with special tools despite controlling proper legal authority to pry them open, a developing figure that impacts every area of the agency’s work, Wray said during a speech at a cybersecurity interview in New York.
The FBI has been incapable to access data in more than half of the devices that it tried to open due to encryption, Wray added.
“This is an important public safety issue,” Wray added while saying that an answer is “not so clear-cut.”
The solution is clear-cut, even if it’s not functional. What Wray wants is breakable encryption. And he wants organizations to do the work and shoulder the blame. Wray wants to be able to show up at Apple’s door with a security and walk away with the contents of someone’s phone. How that’s achieved isn’t really his problem. And he’s not intellectually honest enough to own the collateral damage backdoored encryption would cause. But that’s how Wray operates. He discredits companies, claiming encryption is all about profit and the government is all about considering deeply for public safety. Both statements are dishonest.
But Wray isn’t the only FBI employee taking the move to lack encryption personally. And the others saying are taking the rhetoric even further, leading towards personal attacks.
On Wednesday, at the International Conference on Cyber Security in Manhattan, FBI forensic expert Stephen Flatley lashed out at Apple, calling the corporation “jerks,” and “evil geniuses” for making his and his colleagues’ investigative work harder. For example, Flatley opposed that Apple recently made password guesses slower, changing the hash iterations from 10,000 to 10,000,000.
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