During a recent hearing, FBI Director Christopher Wray disclosed that although the agency had obtained access to certain content from the digital devices of the potential assassin of former President Donald Trump, it was not able to view all.
A day later, a group of privacy campaigners convened to devise strategies for more effectively shielding digital data from the FBI and other agencies.
“Going black is a complaint from the FBI. Greg Nojeim, an attorney with the Center for Democracy and Technology, stated during the virtual discussion on Thursday that “this is the golden era of surveillance when you look at the statistics on how often they intercept communications.”
The discussion was organized by Demand Progress and focused on encryption, which Nojeim said is “critical to securing information” in a world where everything is online, including financial and health data as well as personal and professional conversations.
Wray lamented the difficulties caused by encrypted messaging services like Proton Mail, WhatsApp, and Signal, which encrypt messages and make them visible only to the sender and receiver, during the hearing.
Wray announced that the FBI had finally obtained access to Thomas Matthew Crooks’s phone. The agency is still investigating the 20-year-old’s motivation for killing one person, gravely injuring two others, and hurting Trump during a recent event in Pennsylvania.
However according to Wray, getting access to the phone was a “major technological barrier” in and of itself “from an encryption viewpoint,” and the FBI was also having issues with the encrypted chat apps on Crooks’s phone.
Part of Crooks’s content might never be accessible to the FBI, “no matter how good our legal procedure is,” according to Wray.
“As far as our access goes, we’ve managed to get into and use a lot of digital and electrical gadgets, albeit not all of them yet. We’ve also gained access to some of his numerous accounts, although we’re still awaiting access to others. Because of the encryption problem, which poses an increasingly difficult obstacle for law enforcement, we might never be able to access some of them, according to Wray.
According to a source familiar with the briefing, FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate informed lawmakers one week prior to the hearing that the agency had started a “legal process,” like issuing subpoenas with 30 companies, and was awaiting responses from 18 of them, including encrypted platforms, regarding the Crooks investigation.
Senior policy adviser at Demand Progress, Hajar Hammado, stated in a statement that the FBI has a history of trying to breach encrypted systems.
“We can already see Director Wray establishing the foundation, and given the FBI’s long history of attempting to weaken end-to-end encryption, it’s highly possible they will urge the next president to help them accomplish it,” Hammado told the Washington Examiner.
People who are concerned about protecting digital security and privacy, according to Hammado, “ought to be cautious and aggressive in disputing the false narratives the FBI is once again trying to create.”
Participating in the virtual privacy discussion was former Virginia Republican Representative Bob Goodlatte, who brought up the encryption debate following the 2015 San Bernadino, California, tragedy that claimed 14 lives.
After Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, successfully contested the court order requiring Apple to unlock one of the two shooters’ iPhones, the FBI ultimately discovered a third party who could unlock the phone and ended its legal action against Apple.
According to The Washington Post, Azimuth Security, a tiny Australian hacker company, was the third party. According to the publication, the FBI used software from Cellebrite, an Israeli company that federal investigators have been employing more frequently to crack phone encryption, to get into the gunman’s phone in Crooks’s case.
However, during the meeting with the privacy advocates, Widener University law professor Noah Chauvin stated that he had seen “sustained efforts” by law enforcement to approach encryption platforms directly and put pressure on them to add “backdoors into their products that would give the government access to review the messages that are being sent.”
While it is lawful for the FBI to use third parties such as Cellebrite, federal regulations prohibit law enforcement agencies from directly pushing encryption service providers to assist them in accessing protected communications.
After leaving Congress to work as a privacy lobbyist, Goodlatte acknowledged that he understood the FBI’s dissatisfaction with encryption but cautioned that attempts to gain access to encrypted messages through backdoors could present “security vulnerabilities” that could provide foreign adversaries or international criminal organizations with opportunities to hack systems.
Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) proposed an amendment that would prevent the FBI from sponsoring any efforts to weaken encryption, one of the bills the group of privacy hawks wanted Congress to pass.
As part of a legislative spending package, Davidson proposed the amendment, which Republican leaders decided not to discuss until after their August break.
There is ongoing tension on encryption between privacy advocates and the government, but it will probably take months or more before any legislative disputes over the matter escalate because of Capitol Hill’s usual summer recess and the delays in financing bills.
