[Infowarrior] - FBI head expects more gov't litigation over locked phones

[Richard Forno]

(I call BS on Comey's claim they didn't seek to avoid transparency in the VE process.  Maybe not directly, but it's coincidentally a handy 'benefit' of the route they chose. --rick)

FBI head expects more gov't litigation over locked phones
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/279646-comey-expects-more-government-litigation-over-locked-phones
 
By Katie Bo Williams - 05/12/16 09:00 AM EDT

FBI Director James Comey says he expects the U.S. government to seek more lawsuits over access to encrypted communications.

The debate over whether the federal government can compel private companies to unlock personal devices for national security purposes is far from over, Comey told reporters on Wednesday, according to reports.

Citing the recent decision by Facebook’s WhatsApp to offer end-to-end encryption to all of its customers — over 1 billion — Comey said that the move is "affecting the criminal work [of the FBI] in huge ways.”
“In that billion customers are terrorists and criminals, and so that now ubiquitous feature of all WhatsApp products will affect both sides of the house,” Comey said.

Although he does not currently have any plans to bring a legal case against the company, Comey said, “Whether there will be litigation down the road, I don’t know.”

Comey’s remarks come in the wake of the agency’s high-profile dispute with Apple over San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone.

Apple refused to comply with a court order ordering it to help the agency unlock the device, arguing that it would have to write a “backdoor” into the operating system that would put its other customers at risk of a security breach.

The FBI eventually dropped the case when it purchased a “tool” from a third party that allowed it to hack into the device.

The agency has seized about 500 phones it cannot unlock in criminal investigations, Comey said Wednesday.

But none of those 500 phones are the same combination of model and operating system as Farook’s phone, which was running iOS 9 — limiting the hacking tool’s usefulness.

The FBI has come under fire for failing to disclose the vulnerability that it used to hack into the device, so that Apple can patch the flaw.

Comey said Wednesday that the agency did not deliberately avoid a White House review process that might have led to the disclosure of the hole, according to The Washington Post.

He said the agency only purchased the hacking tool — not the rights to the underlying flaw that the tool exploits. He suggested that to purchase the rights would have cost much more money.

“We bought what was necessary to get into that phone, and we tried not to spend more money than we needed to spend,” he said.

“We did not in any form or fashion structure the transaction . . . with an eye toward avoiding” the White House review, he said.

The FBI has said it cannot participate in the so-called Vulnerabilities Equities Process because it doesn’t know enough about the tool it purchased for the review to make sense.

In fact, the details of the deal have been kept so secret that even Comey doesn’t know the identity of the third party that assisted the agency, Reuters reported last week.

Comey said he had a “good sense” of the contractor’s identity, but he “couldn't give you people's names,” according to Reuters.

--
It's better to burn out than fade away.