When the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) isn’t pursuing terrorists that it created, the agency tends to have a pretty abysmal record. The agency recently announced, most likely as propaganda against effective encryption, that it has failed to obtain the contents of 7,000 encrypted devices:
Agents at the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have been unable to extract data from nearly 7,000 mobile devices they have tried to access, the agency’s director has said.
Christopher Wray said encryption on devices was “a huge, huge problem” for FBI investigations.
The agency had failed to access more than half of the devices it targeted in an 11-month period, he said.
The lesson to be learned here is that effective cryptography works. Thanks to effective cryptography the people are able to guarantee their supposed constitutional right to privacy. The restoration of rights should be celebrated but politicians never do because our rights are directly opposed to their goals. I guarantee that this announcement will lead to more political debates in Congress that will result in more bills being introduced to ban the plebs (but not the government, of course) from having effective cryptography. If one of the bills is passed into law, the plebs will have to personally patch their devices to fix the broken cryptography mandated by law (which, contrary to what politicians might believe, is what many of us plebs will do).
If you don’t want government goons violating your privacy, enable the cryptographic features on your devices such as full disk encryption.