FBI Director James Comey has launched a new \u201ccrypto war\u201d by asking Congress to update a two-decade-old law to make sure officials can access information from people\u2019s cellphones and other communication devices.<\/span>
<\/span>The call is expected to trigger a major Capitol Hill fight about whether or not tech companies need to give the government access to their users’ data.<\/span>
<\/span>\u201cIt’s going to be a tough fight for sure,\u201d Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), the Patriot Act\u2019s original author, told The Hill in a statement.<\/span>
<\/span>He argues Apple and other companies are taking the privacy of consumers into their own hands because Congress has failed to pass legislation in response to public anger over the National Security Agency\u2019s surveillance programs.<\/span>
<\/span>\u201cWhile Director Comey says the pendulum has swung too far toward privacy and away from law enforcement, he fails to acknowledge that Congress has yet to pass any significant privacy reforms,\u201d he added. \u201cBecause of this failure, businesses have taken matters into their own hands to protect their consumers and their bottom lines.\u201d<\/span>
<\/span>\u201cIf this becomes the norm, I suggest to you that homicide cases could be stalled, suspects walked free, child exploitation not discovered and prosecuted,\u201d he said last week.<\/span>
<\/span>Comey is asking that Congress update the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), a 1994 law that required telephone companies to make it possible for federal officials to wiretap their users’ phone calls.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nIt’s a back door, much like the infamous Clipper chip, and the greatest effect of such a change would be to allow cyber-criminals to access your data, your machines, and your identity, because if they cripple security in the interest of law enforcement, criminals will avail themselves to the same technology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Note that FBI Director James Comey was specifically chosen by Barack Obama, and the President’s behavior to this point has indicated a strong bias toward the position that, “You don’t need to worry about privacy if you have nothing to hide.” Thus I see Comey’s request for sabotaging the security of computers and mobile devices …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[997,972,1020,1066,1061,1025,979],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","category-justice","category-legislation","category-privacy","category-security","category-technology","category-wanker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185537"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185537\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}