The FBI Wants Backdoors Because Hacking Is Hard

Since the start of the most recent encryption debate, lawful hacking has been pitched by many experts as a more desirable alternative to mandating that companies build government backdoors into their products. Academics have explored legal and technical frameworks for letting police and government agencies hack into suspects' devices by finding and exploiting vulnerabilities, which would allow investigators to collect crucial evidence without catastrophically damaging the security of average users by forcing companies to weaken encryption. But during a congressional hearing of the House Commerce Committee on April 19, the FBI's executive director of technology Amy Hess dismissed the idea outright, saying that agents lack the specialization necessary to effectively harness those hacking capabilities—and that it would be impossible for the Bureau to develop them.

“These types of solutions that we may employ require a lot of highly-skilled, specialized resources that we may not have immediately available to us,” Hess said when asked by Rep Diana DeGette (D-CO) why the FBI can't use its own technical resources toward overcoming encryption without Apple or other companies' help. But when asked whether the FBI could simply develop those resources to up its hacking game, Hess responded, “I don’t see that as possible.” “I think that we really need the cooperation of industry, we need the cooperation of academia, we need the cooperation of the private sector in order to come up with solutions,” she said.