Over the past couple years, America’s digital communications companies have made great progress in developing technologies designed to keep customers’ private communications safe from the prying eyes of snoops and identity thieves. National Intelligence chief James Clapper said Monday the new security developments are “not a good thing.”
“The onset of commercial encryption has accelerated by about seven years,” Clapper lamented at a breakfast hosted by The Christian Science Monitor.
The improvements in commercially available encryption software are having “major, profound effects” on government spies’ ability to snoop on private communications, Clapper added.
The government, of course, doesn’t blame its own overzealous efforts to circumvent the 4th Amendment via digital communication spying for tech giants’ decisions to provide American consumers with stronger privacy protections. Rather, as Clapper noted Monday, top officials continue to pin the blame for a growing privacy-protection market on National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.
“The projected growth maturation and installation of commercially available encryption — what they had forecasted for seven years ahead, three years ago, was accelerated to now, because of the revelation of the leaks,” Clapper said in a response to question from The Intercept.
The security chief maintains that strong encryption is unnecessary for average Americans but a valuable tool for potential terrorists.
End-to-end encryption, he said, “is a major inhibitor to discerning plotting, principally by ISIL and others.”
Of course, what Clapper failed to add is that the government has provided absolutely no evidence that the power to hack cell phones can prevent attacks on innocent Americans.
In fact, new reports concerning the deranged San Bernardino attackers whose shooting rampage kicked off a recent privacy battle between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Apple have left many Americans with more questions than answers about the government’s true goals.
After attempting to force Apple to break its encryption so agents could access killer Syed Farook’s cell phone, the government gave up after being approached by hackers who learned how to break the encryption.
According to Reuters, the FBI paid the hackers more than $1.3 million. The FBI has since reported that the information on the phone wasn’t of much use to its investigation and revealed no ties to ISIS.
The post Spy chief appalled that Americans don’t want government snooping through correspondence appeared first on Personal Liberty®.
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