Officials at the highest levels of U.S. law enforcement have spent more than a year trying to scare Americans into believing technologies designed to keep private communications out of government hands create a digital playground for child molesters, jihadists and other shady characters. A new study from Harvard reveals why the claims hold very little truth.
Since early last year, we’ve seen government officials ratchet up hyperbole about the dangers of tech giants like Apple and Google making it impossible for law enforcement agents to decrypt cellphones seized in criminal investigations.
“The current course we are on, toward deeper and deeper encryption in response to the demands of the marketplace, is one that presents real challenges for those in law enforcement and national security,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told tech industry insiders during a speech last April in Silicon Valley.
“Encryption is making it harder for your government to find criminal activity, and potential terrorist activity,” Johnson continued.
James Comey, who heads up the FBI, has similarly lamented how advances in user privacy are making his job harder.
“Tech execs say privacy should be the paramount virtue,” Comey told lawmakers last year. “When I hear that, I close my eyes and say, ‘Try to image [sic] what the world looks like where pedophiles can’t be seen, kidnapper[s] can’t be seen, drug dealers can’t be seen.’”
Tech companies, Comey and Johnson are fond of claiming, are allowing criminals and terrorists to “go dark” while they plan all manner of dastardly deeds.
But new research courtesy of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society reveals that law enforcement leaders like Johnson and Comey are leaving out key details about the spying capabilities already at their respective agencies’ disposal.
“The ‘going dark’ metaphor does not fully describe the future of the government’s capacity to access the communications of suspected terrorists and criminals,” says a report published Monday by the center.
In fact, the report reveals that the so-called Internet of things is creating new ways for the government to spy on digital users every day.
Here are a few key findings quoted from the report:
*End-to-end encryption and other technological architectures for obscuring user data are unlikely to be adopted ubiquitously by companies, because the majority of businesses that provide communications services rely on access to user data for revenue streams and product functionality, including user data recovery should a password be forgotten.
*Software ecosystems tend to be fragmented. In order for encryption to become both widespread and comprehensive, far more coordination and standardization than currently exists would be required.
*Networked sensors and the Internet of Things are projected to grow substantially, and this has the potential to drastically change surveillance. The still images, video, and audio captured by these devices may enable real-time intercept and recording with after-the-fact access. Thus an inability to monitor an encrypted channel could be mitigated by the ability to monitor from afar a person through a different channel.
*Metadata is not encrypted, and the vast majority is likely to remain so. This is data that needs to stay unencrypted in order for the systems to operate: location data from cell phones and other devices, telephone calling records, header information in e-mail, and so on. This information provides an enormous amount of surveillance data that widespread.
*These trends raise novel questions about how we will protect individual privacy and security in the future. Today’s debate is important, but for all its efforts to take account of technological trends, it is largely taking place without reference to the full picture.
In other words, the government has endless options at its disposal for accessing the information sent over digital networks. And those options will only increase as more of the devices people interact with every day, from televisions to toasters, go online.
Surely this isn’t news to government spies like Comey and Johnson. So why continue to spend so much time and energy requesting surveillance backdoors?
It’s because they really want to scare Americans into believing government spying must be a fact of daily life. Right now, if law enforcement agents gathered evidence based on a private conversation recorded by a smart TV, they’d have a hard time using in in court.
But if society accepts that all electronic devices connected to the Internet are fair game for warrantless listening because the government needs backdoors to look for terrorists, anything caught in the dragnet could become fair game.
Read the full Berkman study below:
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