James Comey, the Director of the U.S. FBI has declared that encryption of communication technology could challenge his job to keep Americans safe.
Increasing recruitment of Americans by the Islamic State terrorist group is taking place through end to end encrypted mobile messaging apps. Despite judicial orders, this kind of communications cannot be intercepted.
The Chef of the Federal Bureau believes that there is no doubt that terrorist hide behind encrypted communication. In a world of universal strong encryption people who don't have the best interests of Americans at heart can take advantage of the technology to escape surveillance measures in place since the September 11 event.
Testimonies by Comey before the Senate judiciary and intelligence committees took place on Wednesday. They reflected an ongoing dispute between the tech companies and U.S. government over the encryption of IT products and services.
President Obama was asked by American tech companies to not pursue any proposal or policy that would create encryption workarounds. The Industry Association for Information Technology and Software representing America's largest tech corporations like Facebook, Google, and Apple, has declared last month that moving towards a weaker encryption would erode consumers' trust in the IT services and products for protecting their information.
For instance, over 80 percent of Google's outbound Gmail messages and 54 percent of inbound mail to other providers are already encrypted. More email services providers have enabled support for encryption technology.
However, Comey warned that increasing use of encryption technology will interfere with government's ability to perform surveillance over personal communications - with the proper court oversight - will go away, affecting public safety.
Despite universal strong encryption the American agencies involved in public safety still need to remain able doing their job. In his opinion, instead of providing end to end encryption, U.S. tech companies should retain access to the encrypted information of their customers. This will ensure that police and security agencies have the tools they need in order to investigate terrorist activity and crimes.
For now, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice aren't pushing for encryption backdoors to give security agencies direct access to information stored on and communications through smartphones or any new legislation to require tech companies to comply with warrant requests. Instead, the FBI and DOJ are continuing their efforts to combat the use of encryption by terrorists and criminals and propose that ITC American companies retain internal access to encrypted information. Instead of pushing for new legislation the DOJ and FBI are looking for voluntary compliance form the American ITC companies.
