FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates were set to argue in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee to argue in support of backdoors in various consumer encryption platforms. They both argued that there is no absolute right to privacy since it has to be weighed against public safety. This is all in regards to law enforcement officials claiming that increasingly difficult levels of encryption have made it difficult to monitor criminal and terrorist communications.
An excerpt from Yates’ remarks reads the following:
I believe that we have to protect the privacy of our citizens and the safety of the Internet. But those interests are not absolute. And they have to be balanced against the risks we face from creating warrant-proof zones of communication.
Both Apple and Google have turned to full-disk encryptions on mobile devices, although latter’s progress has been slower. Apple has touted that iOS 8 as being so difficult to crack that even with a warrant, it would be unable to decrypt the data on an iPhone. Apple CEO, Tim Cook, recently delivered a speech at the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Champions of Freedom event in June, taking a stance and stating that people have a ”fundamental right to privacy.” He went on to state that backdoors are fundamentally flawed as well. He had the following to say regarding the matter:
Criminals are using every technology tool at their disposal to hack into people's accounts. If they know there's a key hidden somewhere, they won't stop until they find it.
Source: Associated Press via AppleInsider
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