James Comey Quotes

Terrorists and criminals are increasingly adept at exploiting cutting-edge technologies to carry out or to mask their crimes. To counter current and emerging threats, the FBI actively deploys a wide range of technology-based tools, capabilities, and training that enable and enhance intelligence, national security, and law enforcement operations.

User-controlled default encryption is a real challenge for law enforcement.

All too often, vital electronic evidence has been made unavailable through encryption that doesn't allow for execution of legal process including court-approved search warrants.

With the growing availability of commoditized encryption, it is becoming easier for common criminals to communicate beyond the reach of traditional surveillance.

Man, I don't want to have nothing to do with computers. I don't want the government in my business.

As all of our lives become digital, the logic of encryption is all of our lives will be covered by strong encryption, and therefore all of our lives - including the lives of criminals and terrorists and spies - will be in a place that is utterly unavailable to court-ordered process. And that, I think, to a democracy should be very, very concerning.

This is not a case about one isolated iPhone. Rather, this case is about the Department of Justice and the FBI seeking through the courts a dangerous power that Congress and the American people have withheld: the ability to force companies like Apple to undermine the basic security and privacy interests of hundreds of millions of individuals around the globe. The government demands that Apple create a back door to defeat the encryption on the iPhone, making its user’s most confidential and personal information vulnerable to hackers, identify thieves, hostile foreign agents, and unwarranted government surveillance.

The use of encrypted communication and data storage to shield terrorist coordination from intelligence and law-enforcement authorities is known as 'going dark.'

David Cameron has already said, and I have said, that a Conservative government would be giving the security agencies and law enforcement agencies the powers that they need to ensure that they are keeping up to date as people communicate with data.

While encryption protects against cyberattacks, deploying it in warrant-proof form jeopardizes public safety more generally.

Apple knows a lot of data. Facebook knows a lot of data. Amazon knows a lot of data. Microsoft used to, and still does with some people, but in the newer world, Microsoft knows less and less about me. Xbox still knows a lot about people who play games. But those are the big five, I guess.

It's so cheap to store all data. It's cheaper to keep it than to delete it. And that means people will change their behavior because they know anything they say online can be used against them in the future.

If 300 million people were to offer up the details of their private lives, you would need to hire another 300 million people just to keep up.

Government and businesses cannot function without enormous amounts of data, and many people have to have access to that data.

We created the ability for people to insert enterprise or personal data.

Without strong encryption, you will be spied on systematically by lots of people.

Unfortunately, changing forms of Internet communication are quickly outpacing laws and technology designed to allow for the lawful intercept of communication content.

In the U.S., you even lose legal rights if you store your data in a company's machines instead of your own. The police need to present you with a search warrant to get your data from you; but if they are stored in a company's server, the police can get it without showing you anything. They may not even have to give the company a search warrant.

I believe people have a right to know what's going on with their information and how it's collected, how it's stored and who gets it.

If information is gathered, history shows that it will be used at some time.

We are all victims of data mining…. We are in a data mining culture…. Americans do not place a high value on the privacy of their communications and will give up that right for modest benefit.

There are two kinds of cryptography in this world: cryptography that will stop your kid sister from reading your files, and cryptography that will stop major governments from reading your files.

.. the amount of sensitive information held within the national security apparatus is immensely larger than it was a generation ago. Technological change has caused an explosion in the rate of information production within government agencies, as everywhere else.

The idea that you can be totally anonymous in the digital age is increasingly hard to execute.

We can find no successful terrorist attack that would have been prevented by the availability of a lawful decryption access technology ...