FBI Director James Comey is Upset About Smartphone Encryption? Tough.

“What concerns me about this is companies
marketing something expressly to allow people to hold themselves
beyond the law,” FBI Director James Comey
whined to reporters gathered at FBI headquarters. His comments
came in response to announcements from Apple and

Google that the latest generation of mobile device operating
systems will not just ease the use of encryption on the devices,
but make it automatic. What has been an opt-in option until now
will become default security for users that, at least
theoretically, puts private information beyond the reach of snoops,
device manufacturers—and law enforcement. (Note
this guide to why you should be careful in how you implement
encryption to minimize holes in your defenses.)

FBI bureaucrats may be upset, but the rest of us have good
reason to cheer the tech companies’ moves. That’s because Comey and
his cronies here in the U.S. and around the world have made it
thoroughly clear over the years that governments are among the more
dangerous threats to people’s privacy.

Comey and other law enforcement officials invoke the specter of
enabled criminals in this brave new world of stronger privacy
protections that scoff at warrants. “Apple will become the phone of
choice for the pedophile,” John J. Escalante, chief of detectives
for Chicago’s police department,
told the Washington Post.

Maybe. But Apple and Android
phones will likely become must-haves for journalists, too, after

revelations about spying by the Department of Justice on the
Associated Press, Fox’s James Rosen, and other journalists. The
current president is “the greatest enemy to press freedom in a
generation,” the New York Times‘ James Risen
noted earlier this year. But there’s no reason to think the
next administration or the one after that will be any more
respectful of privacy or press freedom.

It’s also rich for Comey to complain about companies responding
to greater public demand—in the United States and abroad—after a
tidal wave of revelations about NSA surveillance on private
communications. He may want to hold himself and his agency apart
from the abuses of the national securty snoops, but the FBI
continues
to target the press with national security letters.

And most of us don’t differentiate among government alphabet
soup agencies, anyway. We know they share information back and
forth, across jurisdictions and national borders. They’re all a
threat to our privacy and liberty. Comey complains that eased
encryption will “allow people to hold themselves beyond the law,”
which is the whole damned idea. He and his counterparts give the
public repeated reason to view the law and its enforcers as
enemies.

Does encryption offer potential benefits to actual criminals?
Sure. But it also helps protect the general public against
officials and agencies we have no reason to trust.