Michael Steinbach, assistant director in the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, recently testified that law enforcement’s challenge is working with tech companies to prevent encryption above all else. I take that to mean that he’s taking exception to companies like Apple providing their customers with the means to secure their privacy by engineering their encryption systems so only the user can decrypt messages. Steinbach wants the ability to read those messages when the FBI feels it’s necessary. It’s all right, he says, because they would need to get a warrant first. That argument would be more persuasive if we didn’t have the recent example of the FISA court secretly rubber stamping virtually every request that law enforcement or the NSA made.
Steinbach trots out the usual specter of “going dark.” This tired trope is belied by the fact that we are now living in the golden age of surveillance where the government knows more about us than ever before.
There are, of course, technical reasons that backdoors are a terrible idea but even putting those aside for a second, there is no reason at all why we should trust these people with new surveillance powers. Steinbach’s demurral notwithstanding, the government has forfeited any claim to our trust with their secret, abusive, pervasive surveillance of virtually all Americans. The FBI and NSA can invoke the third party doctrine all they want but they know and we know that surveillance of this sort was never envisioned by the Fourth Amendment.
Then there’s the inconvenient fact that the FBI can’t point to a single case of this surveillance playing a role in any major case. Despite not making use of what they already have, the FBI has come back to the trough demanding more.