#228: FBI Lost Count... Of Locked Phones

Tech Policy Podcast

TechFreedom

Technology

4.8 • 45 Ratings

🗓️ 4 June 2018

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The FBI has been a vocal critic of the spread of encryption, often citing the nearly 8,000 devices connected to crimes that were inaccessible to law enforcement last year as evidence that increased device security represents a major threat to law enforcement. But a recent Washington Post article revealed that this number was seriously inflated due to “programming error,” with the real value estimated at around 1,200. Robyn Greene, the policy counsel and government affairs lead for the Open Technology Institute joins the show to discuss what this mistake means for the future of encryption policy. For more, see this letter led by OTI and signed by TechFreedom calling on the Inspector General to investigate the FBI and DOJ’s handling of the error, as well as Greene’s other work.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Ashken Kassarion. On today's show, we're going to talk about the FBI,
0:11.5	encryption, and going dark. FBI has been a critic of the spread of encryption that we use now on
0:18.5	our phones, everyday devices. They often cite the 8,000 devices that are
0:25.0	connected to crimes that they can't get access to, only in 2017, as an example of why
0:32.6	encryption is bad for law enforcement. Well, a recent Washington Post article revealed that that number is
0:40.7	awfully inflated. The real number of devices that they can't get access to? 1200. FBI says this
0:49.1	is just a programming error. Some civil liberties advocates think that was a weird mistake that they used a lot in their
0:57.9	policy lobbying. We're joined by Robin Green, Policy Council and Government Affairs Lead for the
1:03.8	Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation. She's an expert who has written on this
1:09.0	issue, and we are really happy to have her here.
1:13.0	Robin, thank you for joining us.
1:14.7	Thank you for inviting me.
1:16.2	So let's start from the beginning.
1:18.5	What's the background on this encryption debate?
1:21.1	We all remember San Bernardino case, but then it kind of died down because, as I remember, FBI was able to hire an Israeli firm to break into
1:30.8	the phone? Yeah, so the encryption debate actually started back in the 1990s, right? So people
1:37.4	started using personal computers. The internet started to happen. And the intelligence community
1:42.0	started really freaking out about going dark, about
1:45.3	not being able to wiretap people's communications because of encryption.
1:49.4	So we spent years having a debate about whether the government should be able to have
1:53.5	encryption backdoors.
1:54.6	And ultimately, our security experts were able to really effectively engage in that debate
	...

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