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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>>> FBI director James Comey has called on tech companies to stop "by defaut" end-to-end encryption -- so that the FBI can monitor communications again.

Note the "by default". That suggests the FBI isn't interested in spying on smart people. They only want to go after the dolts who cannot be bothered to enable encryption. Mr Comey obviously doesn't think much of his adversaries if he assumes they won't bother trying to hide.

Either that, or they want to spy on the population generally for purposes other than the prevention of crime. Which is it? Does be believe terrorists are not tech savvy, or does he not care about clever terrorists and instead wants to monitor the plebs? I doubt he has any coherent answer beyond beyond 'More data = good'.

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I hypothesize the FBI wants to expand its credit card fraud division, and the way to accomplish that is make it possible for a thief to simply open his Wifi at Starbucks, run the right script and snatch unencrypted CC's out of the air.

The resulting influx of credit card theft would do wonders for the headcount and political importance of the credit card fraud investigation department...

I get your point. But, tangentially, I believe the Secret Service handles more of the credit card fraud stuff. There was just some discussion in the news the other day about the Secret Service being stretched too thin because of all the time they spent on investigating financial "cyber crime" vs. guarding the president and such.

Anyway, here's a couple links on what to report to which:

Secret Service: http://www.fraudaid.com/solution_center/jurisdictions/usfed-...

FBI: http://www.fraudaid.com/solution_center/jurisdictions/usfed-...

If apple disabled the end-to-end encryption in imessage, it wouldn't let the FBI spy on everybody's convos. The conversations would still be secure from device to apple via SSL.

It would just allow them to get a warrant and wiretap someone's convos.

Sorry, I'm having trouble following your argument. Are you suggesting by your quote that the FBI is saying such things so that only "non smart" people will listen to them, and turn off end-to-end encryption?

I believe the point they're going for is that if end-to-end encryption were off by default the majority of people would not turn it on, so to speak.

So the goal is to be able to passively collect more data, rather than actively track down criminals who would presumably take precautions to ensure their activity is suitably encrypted.

>criminals who would presumably take precautions

This strikes me as weak. Sure, some criminals would still enable it, but most criminals wouldn't. I've made the same arguments in greater detail here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10580829 , and lower link to some criminal activity with hundreds of millions at stake that communicated over email.

He's not advocating that we un-invent the math that underpins crypto, so there is no way to prevent all crypto.

I interpret his words to talk specifically about people who choose not to add their own crypto layer on top of the OS / provider product layer. "opt-in" could mean the provider makes it available to the user, or (IMHO more likely) it could mean the average Joe that is unfamiliar with setting up a secure communication channel on their smart phone would not likely go through the hoops of learning to do just that.

It's so stupid for the government to not realize that if they can slurp up data from unencrypted traffic to businesses, then so can foreign adversaries. How are they so sure that this power leans more to them than to foreign entities? That's an edge against both American businesses and consumers.

I noted the "by defaut" and was surprised to see such a blatant spelling error in the first sentence of a Wired article.

I have a Wired magazine next to my toilet that has a picture of George Lucas and says "40 YEARS OF ILM" right on the cover

ILM stands for industrial light and magic, his special effects shop, and 40 years ago was when they started making special effects for star wars. it's not 'film'.

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