Law enforcement agencies including the FBI have long criticized data encryption[1] as a threat to their ability to fight crime. They argue that encryption allows bad actors to "go dark," impeding agents’ ability to access the data of suspects, even with court orders or warrants. After years of raising the alarm about the going dark problem, though, officials have yet to convince privacy advocates that undermining encryption protections would do more good than harm. And critics say that the FBI in particular has failed to show that the problem is significant.
A Tuesday report[2] in the Washington Post fueled this debate, revealing that the FBI had vastly overstated the number of devices to which it could not gain access. For months, FBI officials including director Christopher Wray have said publicly—including to Congress—that in the fiscal year ended September 2017 the FBI was locked out of 7,775 cellphones it had the legal authority to access. Privacy advocates have been skeptical, noting that the FBI's figure for fiscal year 2016 was 880 inaccessible devices. The FBI confirmed on Tuesday evening that the 2017 figure was flawed.
The FBI said the error stemmed from an April 2016 move to combine information from three distinct databases. “The FBI recently became aware of flaws with the methodology implemented in April 2016, and has determined the previously reported FY 2017 statistics are incorrect,” the statement said, blaming “programming errors” that “resulted in significant over-counting of mobile devices reported” through the databases.
An official elaborated on Wednesday that the false number came from an error that over-counted entries in one of the three databases, resulting in a gradual but consistent swell in the number of devices reported as the months went on. The official says that this slow