FWIW he went on 60 Minutes last week and came off as very pro-1st amendment.

This doesn't make up for his view here.

Also, coming from him, it seems sort of like encouraging citizens to drive past license plate readers.

Excerpt: The increasing adoption of encryption technologies could leave law enforcement agents "in the dark" and unable to collect evidence against criminals, the Director of the FBI said in a speech on Thursday.

Tough cookies. When you have reasonable basis to investigate someone, get a warrant to investigate that person. You know...like you're supposed to?

This all started in the early '90s, as electronic telephone switching systems were replacing the older electromechanical switches. Back in the day of the old switches, law enforcement could and did get warrants to trace telephone calls. But it was a high-effort and lengthy process to actually do it. First, law enforcement did not have the technical capability to trace calls themselves; they needed the assistance of an experienced switch technician. Second, it took time; the tech had to physically examine the switch elements and trace signals with probes. If the call being traced was long distance, the trace might involve several techs at different central offices. All of this tended to discourage fishing expeditions; telephone companies had little patience with grubby-pawed agencies and had ways of making things difficult for agencies that frequently requested frivolous traces.

Once electronic switches and digital trunk lines becaome commonplace, this type of call tracing become impossible. So in the early '90s, the federal government put pressure on switch manufacturers to install back doors in their switching systems, specifically for the FBI's use but also available to other law enforcement. This was sold as simply being the equivalent of the call tracing capability that was available with the old switches, but in fact it went far beyond. It worked in seconds; it retained data about past behavior, and it required neither physical access to the switch nor assistance from a phone company tech. Phone companies noted at the time that as soon as this capability was available, warrants for call taps and traces went waaaaay up.

But wait, the story gets worse: In theory, the law enforcement access port was under the phone company's control; they kept it turned off and would only turn it on when shown a warrant. However, there were two problems with this. First, once the port was turned on, access was not restricted to the subject of the warrant; law enforcement had the run of the system and could listen in on any call and pull records from anywhere. (This was justified at the time by saying that criminals would use multiple phone lines to communicate, and that law enforcement needed to be able to trace calls across multiple systems.) Second, there was always the suspicion that the federal government had actually pressured the switch manufacturers (of which there are only a handful) into installing a back door in the back door, so that federal agencies, specifically the FBI and NSA, could acccess the law enforcement port and browse through systems without the phone company's knowledge or consent. This was never proven one way or the other, and the theory was regarded as paranoid at the time. But the recent Snowden allegations showing that exactly that thing has occurred with Internet hubs has re-awakened the old suspicion, which now looks plausible.

The moral of the story is that when information is easy for law enforcement to access, law enforcement will access it, warrants be damned. This should surprise nobody; it's the nature of tyrannical governments throughout human history. We were spoiled by circumstances in the 20th century, when the specific combination of technologies and political circumstances provided pretty good guarantees of privacy against unwarranted government intrusion. The checks and balances that existed then are all gone now. New ones need to be created.

The big Internet companies all have mud on their faces from the Snowden relevations, in which it has been shown that they meekly (sometimes eagerly) consented to unconstitutional spying. They threw away all of the consumer trust that the phone companies once had, and now they've got to build that back. This is one reason that Apple and Google are doing what they are doing. Make no mistake, the NSA can crack any encryption available to the public -- but it takes time. Even the NSA only has so many CPU cycles available to it, which means they can only take on the important cases and don't have processor time to waste on frivolous searches. So we see how this restores the balance, at least in one respect.

Most interesting and informative post, Cousin Dave. And for what it's worth, if anyone else had posted it, I'd be demanding links to back up everything you're saying.

Thanks, Patrick. If you want to read more about the sort of thing that went on in the '90s when encryption was first appearing in commercially available technology, point your search engine at "Clipper Chip".

Look, the FBI is asking their date (America) if they can just put it in "a little".

Which, they promise, is the opposite of the full-force raping the Constitution has taken at the hands of the NSA and the FBI and all the other alphabet agencies lo these many years.

America would say "sure, just the tip though!" if we could still FEEL anything down there.