The FBI Wants $38 More Million to Buy Encryption-Breaking Technology by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai.
From the post:
For more than a year, FBI Director James Comey has been publicly complaining about how much of a hard time his agents, as well as local and state cops, are having when they encounter encryption during their investigations.
Now, the FBI is asking for more money to break encryption when needed.
In its budget request for next year, the FBI asked for $38.3 more million on top of the $31 million already requested last year to “develop and acquire” tools to get encrypted data, or to unmask internet users who hide behind a cloak of encryption. This money influx is designed to avoid “going dark,” an hypothetical future where the rise of encryption technologies make it impossible for cops and feds to track criminal suspects, or to access and intercept the information or data they need to solve crimes and investigations.
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Greet story and the total requested by the FBI totals up to: $69.3 million.
From further in the post:
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For Julian Sanchez, one of the authors of a recent report on going dark, which concluded that technology is actually helping law enforcement, rather than hindering it, is skeptical that the FBI even needs all this money.“$38.3 million is a hefty chunk of change to dole out for a ‘problem’ the FBI has so steadfastly refused to publicly quantify in any meaningful way,“ he told me. “First let’s see some hard numbers about how often encryption is a serious obstacle to investigations and what the alternatives are; then maybe we’ll be in a position to know how much it’s reasonable to spend addressing the issue.“
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But to be fair to Director Comey, there isn’t a metric in the possession of the FBI (or anyone else) that would justify a dollar on breaking encryption any more or less than $1 million or $1 billion.
Those numbers simply don’t exist. How do we know that?
I’m willing to concede that the publicists for the FBI are probably dishonest but their’re not stupid.
If there was any evidence, even evidence that had to be perverted to support the case for breaking encryption research, it would be on a flashing banner on the FBI website.
What you are seeing from Director Comey is a “butts in seats” management style.
How many “butts” you can get into seats, yours or contractors, increases the prestige of your department and the patronage you can dispense. You may think those are not related to the mission of the department.
You would be right but so what? What made you think that appropriations have any relationship to the mission of the department? The core mission of the department is to survive and increase its influence. Mission is something you put on flyers. Nothing more.
I don’t mean to denigrate the “heads down, doing their jobs as best they can even with political master interventions staff,” but they aren’t the ones who set policy or waste funds in “butts in seats” management plans.
Congress needs to empower inspector generals and the Government Accounting Office to vet agency budget proposals prior to submission to Congress. Unsubstantiated requests should be deleted from requests and not restored by Congress during the budgetary process.
It’s called evidence based management for anyone unfamiliar with the practice.