Bill Gertz has the story. With Stephen Green commentary.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein warned Monday that strong encryption built into handheld devices is preventing law enforcement agencies from protecting Americans from criminals and terrorists.
Rosenstein said "warrant-proof" encryption used on smart phones and other devices has blocked courts from gaining access to evidence and intelligence needed to protect citizens. He called the problem "one of our greatest challenges."
"Warrant-proof encryption defeats the constitutional balance by elevating privacy above public safety," Rosenstein said in a speech to the Naval Academy in Annapolis.
"Encrypted communications that cannot be intercepted and locked devices that cannot be opened are law-free zones that permit criminals and terrorists to operate without detection by police and without accountability by judges and juries," he added.
The deputy attorney general called for "responsible encryption" that allows data to be accessed under court order.
Let's pull the veil aside, shall we?
"Responsible encryption" means that Uncle Sam holds a skeleton key to all your personal data. In other words, your information is only as secure as, say, our latest war plans for North Korea -- which are now reportedly in the hands of North Korean hackers.
Even the NS-freaking-A isn't immune:
The NSA is one of the world's most notoriously secretive and powerful government agencies, guarding its powerful hacking tools and massive caches of collected data under layers of security clearances and world-class technical protections. But it turns out that three times in three years, that expensive security has been undone by one of its own contract employees simply carrying those secrets out the door.
In 2013, an NSA contractor named Edward Snowden walked out of the agency's building in Oahu, Hawaii, carrying a USB drive full of thousands of top-secret documents. Last year, a 53-year-old Booz Allen contractor for the NSA named Hal Martin was arrested last year for taking 50 terabytes out of the agency over a period as long two decades. And Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that in 2015, a third contract employee of the NSA in as many years took home a trove of classified materials that included both software code and other information that the agency uses in its offensive hacking operations, as well as details of how it protects US systems from hacker adversaries.
That classified data, which wasn't authorized to be removed from the perimeter of the facility where that contractor worked, was then stolen from the contractor's home computer by Russian spies, who exploited the unnamed employee's installation of antivirus software from Kaspersky, a Russian company.
Read that last line again: Our own National Security Agency was using Russian antivirus software.
Washington wants a backdoor key to everything -- where my kids go to school and what time I pick them up, the digitized receipts I keep as records of certain purchases, my entire photo library -- when they can't even protect their own data. Forget for the moment whatever sinister ends might get cooked up by the same people who weaponized the IRS, and imagine the most personal data of 320 million Americans sitting pretty in a Russian data farm. Because you know that's exactly what will happen.
And all to "protect" us.
No thanks.