The Members Forum

The FBI pushed Thursday for more built-in backdoors for online communication, but beat a hasty retreat from its earlier proposal to require providers of encrypted communications services to include a backdoor for law enforcement wiretaps.

FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni told Congress that new ways of communicating online could cause problems for law enforcement officials, but categorically stated that the bureau is no longer pushing to force companies like RIM, which offers encrypted e-mail for business and government customers, to engineer holes in their systems so the FBI can see the plaintext of a communication upon court order.

"Addressing the Going Dark problem does not require fundamental changes in encryption technology," Caproni said in her written testimony (PDF). "We understand that there are situations in which encryption will require law enforcement to develop individualized solutions."

("Going Dark" is the FBI's codename for its multimillion-dollar project to extend its ability to wiretap communications as they happen.)

That's a far cry from what Caproni told The New York Times last fall:

"No one should be promising their customers that they will thumb their nose at a US court order," Ms. Caproni said. "They can promise strong encryption. They just need to figure out how they can provide us plain text."

Those remarks indicated the FBI seemed to want to revisit the encryption wars of the 1990s. That largely ended with the government scrapping its plans to mandate backdoors in encryption, after security researchers discovered flaws in the idea, and the National Research Council concluded that strong encryption made the country safer.

ARS Technica has the details HERE!