In news that will surprise exactly no Irreal readers, the Washington Post and Techdirt are reporting that the FBI has been lying about the “going dark” problem. One of their favorite refrains is that terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and whatever today’s fourth horseman of the Infocalypse is have been using their encrypted smartphones to frustrate the FBI’s ability to keep us and the American way safe. Their latest estimate is that they are currently locked out of nearly 7,800 phones. Therefore, the next line goes, we need a law that gives us a backdoor into that encrypted information.
Everyone who knows anything at all about the matter knows that this is all nonsense and that the backdoor or golden key or whatever the current euphemism is would make us less, not more, safe. Now it turns out that even the underlying fact for these claims is wrong. Critics have long been suspicious of the 7,800 phones that the FBI claims they can’t access. Now the FBI has admitted that the actual number is probably around 1,200.
It wasn’t that they were lying, they say, it was merely an error. It was, in fact, the ever popular “computer error” that caused the miscount. They mumble about multiple databases and phones being counted more than once. But here’s the thing: According to Wikipedia, there are just 56 FBI field offices in the U.S. What’s wrong with calling them up and asking, “How many locked phones are you currently trying to access?” One agent, or even secretary, could easily get that done in a day or two. Remember that these phones are evidence and are thus recorded in chain of custody logs. I find the claim that it’s hard to suss out this information to be disingenuous if not absurd.
The FBI is not having a good year. Practically everything they’ve told us has turned out to be false. At the same time, they appear unable to handle even routine investigative tasks like following up on the tip that Broward County, Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz wanted to “kill people” and that there was a potential of him being involved in a school shooting. That potential was realized when Cruz killed 17 people and wounded 17 more. The FBI lied about that too, of course.