The debate and conversation seems to have no end in sight.? More than a year after the Edward Snowden revelations, instead of making technology more private, some government leaders are calling for the exact opposite.
James Corney, the current FBI Director, wants to require all technology companies to provide law enforcement easy access to encrypted information without the people’s knowledge. Mr. Corney argues without this, criminals and terrorists will escape justice and run rampant. Apple and Google are encrypting data on smartphones that can’t be decrypted. That’s only adding fuel to Corney’s fire. Now the FBI director is calling on congress to address the issue and update laws and is going on the lecture circuit to win people over to his decrypting cause. He knows the opposition is intense, thanks to the Edward Snowden scandal. And he has a ready response for such critics: “?Have we become so mistrustful of government and law enforcement in particular that we?re willing to let bad guys walk away?? FBI Director Corney talked about a Louisiana case to illustrate. In that case, cell phone records and text messages led to a successful capture and prosecution of a sex offender’s murder of a 12-year-old boy. He talked about other cases in which this technology has helped arrest and lock up the bad guys.
These cases are absolutely horrifying! They’re so horrifying in fact that the FBI Director is kind of winning me over to his side. But infringing on the civil liberties and civil rights of innocent human beings isn’t right. I wish I could totally trust our authorities that they would use wiretapping to target criminals and terrorist, but after the past several years, I’m sorry to say I can’t. How do you draw the line between using technology to lock up the bad guys while respecting innocent people’s civil liberties and rights?