What it is: James Comey’s latest book explains how encryption drove the FBI crazy.
Fired FBI director, James Comes, recently wrote a book called “A Higher Loyalty” where he says that Apple and Google’s default encryption on their mobile devices drove the FBI crazy. One of the quotes from the book says:
I found it appalling that the tech types couldn’t see this. I would frequently joke with the FBI “Going Dark” team assigned to seek solutions, “Of course the Silicon Valley types don’t see the darkness–they live where it’s sunny all the time and everybody is rich and smart.”
The problem with the FBI’s view of encryption is that they want companies like Apple and Google to make encryption easy for the US government to crack. What that means is that such encryption would also make it easy for everyone else to crack, rendering the encryption useless.
So the question boils down to either having encryption on or off. There’s no in between. It’s impossible for encryption to be one for the good guys but easily crackable for the bad guys. That’s like saying math should only be used by good guys and banned from bad guys. For the government to constantly insist on encryption backdoors shoes a clear lack of understanding how encryption works. The government might as well try to van the law of gravity from bad guys as well.
Anyone who argues that encryption should only work for the government clearly does not understand encryption at all. To make such uneducated and inaccurate statements supporting encryption backdoors shows ignorance of the topic. If government officials won’t educate themselves on how encryption works, they’re doing the public a huge disservice by advocating for something that’s clearly impossible.
Any thinking person who takes time to understand encryption will come to the conclusion that encryption backdoors simply will not work. The moment someone advocates for encryption backdoors, that’s a clear signal that that person has no idea what they’re talking about and is broadcasting their blatant ignorance for everyone to see. The trouble is that many other people will also believe in such myths and fail to learn about the fundamentals of encryption.
A topic such as backdoor encryption should be easily dealt with through facts alone. Nobody is arguing against the law of gravity, yet government officials are arguing against a similar impossibility as encryption backdoors. The next time any government official tells you hat encryption backdoors are necessary, that’s a clear sign to question that person’s intelligence.
To read more about James Comey’s claims supporting encryption backdoors, click here.