The Washington Post is reporting that the FBI who aren’t fans of encrypted smarphones provided Congress with “grossly inflated” statistics on the number of electronic devices it has been been unable to access due to encryption:
The FBI’s initial assessment is that programming errors resulted in significant over-counting of mobile devices reported,” the FBI said in a statement Tuesday. The bureau said the problem stemmed from the use of three distinct databases that led to repeated counting of the same phones. Tests of the methodology conducted in April 2016 failed to detect the flaw, according to people familiar with the work.
And that my friends is a problem because the FBI used those numbers to argue that companies like Apple and Google need to either do away with encryption entirely or create “back doors” for law enforcement. Now the FBI still says that encryption is a problem that needs to be addressed, but they’re going to get few people buying into that after this bit of news.
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This entry was posted on May 23, 2018 at 7:20 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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The FBI “Grossly Inflated” Stats On Investigations Stymied By Encrypted Smartphones
The Washington Post is reporting that the FBI who aren’t fans of encrypted smarphones provided Congress with “grossly inflated” statistics on the number of electronic devices it has been been unable to access due to encryption:
The FBI’s initial assessment is that programming errors resulted in significant over-counting of mobile devices reported,” the FBI said in a statement Tuesday. The bureau said the problem stemmed from the use of three distinct databases that led to repeated counting of the same phones. Tests of the methodology conducted in April 2016 failed to detect the flaw, according to people familiar with the work.
And that my friends is a problem because the FBI used those numbers to argue that companies like Apple and Google need to either do away with encryption entirely or create “back doors” for law enforcement. Now the FBI still says that encryption is a problem that needs to be addressed, but they’re going to get few people buying into that after this bit of news.
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This entry was posted on May 23, 2018 at 7:20 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.