If The FBI Can't Stop All These Leaks About An Investigation, Why Would it Be Able To Keep Encryption Backdoor Secret?

In the last 10 days or so, James Comey sent two letters to Congress -- the first one notifying Congress of some new information in an "unrelated" investigation that may pertain to Hillary Clinton's emails. And then the one from yesterday admitting that there was nothing important in those emails. That was effectively all that Comey said officially. Yet, in between all of that a ton of information leaked from the FBI about the investigation. We learned what it pertained to (the Anthony Weiner investigation), heard estimates of the number of emails involved, heard that the FBI found them weeks ago but only told Comey right before he sent the letter, that the FBI didn't have a warrant to read the emails -- and then that it did, and that a whole bunch of people inside both the FBI and DOJ have opinions on both sides of this whole mess.

Basically, the FBI (and the DOJ) were leaking information like it was the last chance they'd ever have to leak information and their lives depended on who could leak the most.

And, remember, this is the same damn agency that is so insistent on forcing tech companies to put backdoors into any encryption to make sure the FBI can get into anything it wants. Yet, they can't keep the basic details of an investigation secret? And then they expect everyone to just accept it when they say that we can trust them to keep backdoors secret and to only use them appropriately? That seems like a huge leap of faith for a government bureau that has done almost nothing to deserve that kind of support.

The next time (and it's coming...) the FBI starts talking about "Going Dark" and how it needs to break basic technology tools, perhaps stand up and remind people that this is an organization that can't keep its own secrets very well. Perhaps we shouldn't trust it with all of our secrets as well.

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