Comey said he understands that these companies are trying to provide users with what the market demands Recent revelations of the NSA’s capabilities made by Edward Snowden and the recent hacks in big websites and service habe played their part in users seeking end to end encryption of their data. FBI said that it is not looking for a backdoor or vulnerability to carry on the lawful surveillance, so in defence to the decryption needs, they point out that, with sophisticated encryption they won’t be able to track the criminals. The encryption is a challenge to National Security Agency (NSA) which relieves heavily on smartphone snooping. FBI Director made a veiled threat that if the tech companies themselves dont come up with a way to help the law enforcement agencies to help decrypt the users information when demanded lawfully, “CONGRESS MIGHT HAVE TO FORCE THIS ON COMPANIES”. While the ordinary users and privacy advocates seem happy with the latest encryption enabled in the mobile devices by Apple and Google, law enforcement agencies seems to be unable to digest it. How far this slugfest between the US law enforcement agencies and the tech companies go, is anybody’s guess.
