FBI Director James Comey told an audience he thinks the government should have a back door to gain access to secure devices. (Holly LaFon/MEDILL NSJI)

WASHINGTON — FBI Director James Comey on Wednesday criticized tech giants including Apple and Google for opposing so-called “back doors” in security software for government agencies to access encrypted phones, computers, and other devices.

The tech companies along with academic experts and advocacy groups wrote a letter to President Obama on Tuesday opposing statements by administration officials who have come out strongly against more robust encryption on consumer products. In fact, some officials have advocated that tech companies stop selling encrypted products altogether unless the government has a way to decrypt the data.

The letter makes the case that weakening products’ security would only make them more vulnerable to “innumerable criminal and national security threats.”

But Mr. Comey, addressing the Cybersecurity Law Institute at Georgetown University, said the FBI faces increasing difficulty in unlocking encrypted devices – and those who signed the letter were either not being fair-minded or were failing to see the societal costs to universal strong encryption.

“Either one of those things is depressing to me,” he said.

Citizens’ privacy interests and public safety are coming closer to “a full-on collision,” he said. Acknowledging “tremendous societal benefits” to encryption, Comey said the inability of law enforcement officials to gain access to encrypted devices when they have probable cause and strong oversight threatens public safety.

“As all of our lives become digital, the logic of encryption is all of our lives will be covered by strong encryption,” he said. “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 to a democracy should be utterly concerning.”

However, tech companies and encryption advocates argue in the letter that creating back doors would also pose an economic threat to the companies, especially in light of the Edward Snowden leaks.

“US companies are already struggling to maintain international trust in the wake of revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs. Introducing mandatory vulnerabilities into American products would further push many customers – be they domestic or international, individual or institutional – to turn away from those compromised products and services,” the letter said.

What’s more, critics – including many lawmakers – who oppose efforts to weaken encryption say that creating a system in which government agencies have access to secure data would also create vulnerabilities exploitable by criminal hackers and other governments.

Comey acknowledged the business pressures and competitive issues involved, but urged tech companies to find a safe way to cooperate with government needs to access information.

“Smart people, reasonable people will disagree mightily, technical people will say it’s too hard,” he said. “My reaction to that is, ‘Really? Too hard? Too hard for the people that we have in this country to figure something out?’ I’m not that pessimistic.”

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But is there a way to live normally while also living less visibly on the grid? What steps can you take to reduce your digital footprint that don’t overly restrict your movements?

What is a digital footprint?

Your digital footprint is the data you leave behind when you use a digital service—browse the web, swipe a rewards card, post on social media. Your digital footprint is usually one of two classifications: active or passive.

Your active digital footprint is any information you willingly give out about yourself, from the posts you put up on Facebook to the location information you give to your local mass transit system when you swipe your transit pass.

By contrast, your passive digital footprint is information that’s being collected about you without your express knowledge or authorization, for example, the “cookies” and “hits” saved when you visit a website. When you see personalized ads on Google, for example, those are tailored to you through collection of your personal preferences as inferred through collection of your passive digital footprint.

To assess my digital footprint, I looked through my wallet, my computer and my phone.

The footprint in your wallet

First, the wallet: I have several rewards cards, each representing a company that has a record of me in its database that shows how often I shop and what I buy, which is linked to my name, address, email and birthday—plus a security question in case I forget my password, usually my mother’s middle name.

While I would consider this information fairly benign—they don’t have my credit card information or my Social Security number—these companies can still make many inferences about me from my purchases. CVS, for example, could probably say fairly accurately if I’m sick based on my purchase of medications, whether I’m sexually active based on birth control purchases and any medical conditions I may have based on my prescription purchases.

If I wanted to minimize my digital footprint, I could terminate all my rewards accounts and refrain from opening any more. For me, though, it’s worth allowing these companies to collect my information in order to receive the deals, coupons and specials afforded me as a rewards member.

Next up is my transit pass, which is linked to my name, local address and debit card. The transit authority has a record of every time I swipe my way onto a city bus or train, a record of my movements linked to my name.

A minimal-footprint alternative to a transit pass is single-use fare cards. If purchased with cash, they would leave no record of my travels linked to my name. While this, like the rewards cards, is feasible, it’s far less convenient than the pass —so much less so that again I’m willing to compromise my privacy.

My debit card and insurance card are the two highest-value sources of personal information, but both are utterly necessary—living half a country away from my local credit union, I need my debit card to complete necessary transactions. My medical insurance card, relatively useless to identity thieves unless they have an ID with my name on it, does represent another large file in a database with my personal information—doctors’ visits, prescriptions and hospital stays for the past several years. People with just the physical card, not my license or information, can’t do much with that, but if a hacker gets to that information it could be very damaging.

No driver’s license? No credit card?

To minimize my digital footprint, then, I could pare down my wallet to just the absolute necessities—my insurance card, debit card and my license. You didn’t talk about your license

Computer footprint

If I’m guilty of leaving a large digital footprint, all my worst infractions probably happen across the Web.

Between Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, I’ve broadcast my name, picture, email, hometown and general movements, if not my specific location, on each of those sites. Of the three, Facebook certainly has the most comprehensive picture of my life for the past seven years—where I’ve been, with whom, what I like and what I’m thinking.

If I wanted to take myself as far off the grid as feasible, simply deactivating the accounts wouldn’t work—Facebook keeps all your information there for you to pick up where you left off. You can permanently delete it with no option for recovery, but some information isn’t stored just on your account—messages exchanged with friends, for example, or any information shared with third-party apps.

If you keep using social networking sites, privacy policies change frequently, meaning that even if you choose the most restrictive privacy settings, you often have to go back and re-set them whenever the company changes its policy. Apps complicate things even further, farming out much of your information to third-party companies with different privacy policies.

Even if you’re vigilant about your privacy settings and eschew apps, your profile is only as private as your most public Facebook friend, said Paul Rosenzweig, a privacy and homeland security expert.

When shopping online, it’s important to check the privacy statements and security policies of the companies you’re using. If possible, purchase gift cards to the specific retailer or from credit card companies and use those to shop, so you don’t leave your credit card information vulnerable to breaches like that of Target.

I know that email is not my friend when it comes to online privacy, but I can’t operate without it.  I use Gmail on Google Chrome for my email, so I installed Mymail-Crypt. It’s one of several “pretty good protection,” or PGP, encryption programs. Using it, my messages appear to be a jumbled bunch of letters until the recipient decrypts it using their private key, which I can save to a key server, like the aptly named Keyserver, where it’s searchable by my email or key ID. I can then link to it on my personal profiles such as Facebook or LinkedIn. People can then send an encrypted email to me using my public key that cannot be read without my private key to unlock it. I’ve also started encrypting my G-Chats using Off the Record chat.

Email can be used against you. Phishers have started to send more sophisticated emails imitating individuals or companies you trust in order to convince you to give up information like your social security number or credit card data. Drew Mitnick a junior policy counselor at digital rights advocacy group Access Now, said you need to be vigilant no matter what you’re doing on the internet.

“Ensure that whoever you’re dealing with is asking for appropriate information within the scope of the service,” he said. In other words, Gap shouldn’t be asking for your Social Security number.

To limit cookies and other data collection during your Internet use, you can open incognito windows in Google Chrome. In incognito mode, the pages you view don’t stay in your browser or search histories or your cookie store—though your Internet service provider and the sites you visit still have a record of your browsing.

Finally, encrypt your hard drive. Privacy laws vary from state to state and country to country so the best way to ensure that you’re protected no matter where you are is to encrypt your computer and be careful not leave it where someone can mess with it, said Mitnick.

Phone footprint

Another source of vulnerability for many people is a smartphone. As long as you have a phone, you’re on the grid—phone companies can triangulate your position using cell phone towers and location services, and they log your calls. Beyond that, though, there are steps you can take to limit information people can access about you using your phone.

First, be judicious when installing apps. Carefully read the permissions an app requires for installation, and if you’re uncomfortable with them, don’t install it! Read privacy policies and terms of use so you know what data the app keeps on you.

Because I have a Windows phone, many of the basic apps (alarms, maps, Internet Explorer, music, and Microsoft Office) are Microsoft apps and use their terms of use and privacy policy, which is pretty good about not sharing my information with third parties. They also delete your account data after you delete their app, though it may take a few weeks.

I have several social apps, such as the aforementioned Facebook and Pinterest, for which the privacy settings are fairly similar to their desktop counterparts—not very private—with the added bonus of them now having access to my location and phone number. It’s entirely possible—and advisable, if you’re trying to leave a minimal footprint—to live without these apps, but I choose not to.

I’m selective about the apps I install on my phone. Aside from the apps that come with the phone and my social media apps, I only have Uber—and that has a lot of access to my phone. According to the app information, Uber can access my contacts, phone identity, location, maps, microphone, data services, phone dialer, speech and web browser. That’s a lot, and not all of it seems necessary—why does Uber need my contacts? Again, though, I chose to compromise my privacy on this one because the convenience, for me, outweighed the risk.

A precaution I’ve always taken is turning off my location service unless I need it. While my cell phone company can still track me, this prevents my apps from accessing my location. I don’t need Pinterest or Facebook to know where I am to get what I want out of the app, so I don’t provide that information to them.

One of the projects Access Now has been working on is “super cookies”—when you use your cell phone, the cell companies can attach unique identifiers to your browsing as you go across multiple sites. Many companies don’t even offer opt-outs. AT&T has now stopped using super cookies, but other companies still do so.

If you don’t already, use two-step verification whenever possible to ensure that no one but you is logging onto your accounts. This process, used by Gmail, has you enter your password and a one-time numerical code texted to a phone number you provide.

Set a passcode to your phone if you haven’t already, and make it something people couldn’t easily guess—don’t use your birthday, for example. I’ve started using random numbers and passwords generated for long-defunct accounts like my middle school computer login that I memorized years ago but that can’t be linked back to me.

Amie Stepanovich of Access Now suggested using four unrelated words strung together for online account passwords—they’re even harder to hack than the usual suggestions of capital and lowercase letters, symbols and numbers.

One final precaution you can take is to encrypt your device. Apple has already started encrypting its phones by default, and Google has promised to do so. Regardless, you can turn on encryption yourself. I have a Windows phone, which does not allow for easy encryption—in fact, I can’t encrypt my SD card at all. To encrypt my phone, I need to log in to Office 365 on my laptop and change my mobile device mailbox policies to require a password, encryption, and an automatic wipe after a number of passcode fails I choose. I then log into Office 365 on my phone to sync the new settings. It’s much more straightforward for an Android—just go to settings, security, and choose “Encrypt phone.”

Off the grid? Not even close

For me – and most people, it’s not feasible to live entirely off the grid. Between my debit card, various online accounts and smartphone, I pour my personal data into company and government databases every day. The trick is to live on the grid intelligently, only providing the information that is necessary and taking steps to protect your devices from unauthorized access.

(Mike Renlund/Flickr)

WASHINGTON — As Antoine Jones drove his Jeep Grand Cherokee around the Washington area  in the fall of 2005, he was simply going about his daily routine.  But unfortunately for Jones, whose daily routine involved frequenting a drug stash house in Maryland filled with $850,000 and 97 kilograms of cocaine, the U.S. government was watching.

Thanks to a global positioning system covertly placed in the underbelly of Jones’ car, the government was able to track and record the Jeep’s every move.  But Jones challenged the legality of evidence, saying the GPS had not been installed within the time frame or physical jurisdiction outlined by the court in issuing a search warrant. The government argued that the GPS placement didn’t actually constitute a search under the Fourth Amendment so the fact that police had not followed the warrant guidelines was irrelevant.

In what many viewed as a strong victory for privacy rights, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the attachment of the device was  a search under the Fourth Amendment, thus requiring a warrant.  But while the opinion authored by Justice Antonin Scalia answered the specific question in regards to a “physical search,” it was mum on the broader implications of the ruling.

“[The case] simply left for another day whether monitoring a device that had been preinstalled or otherwise gathering a large quantum of data on somebody would also raise a Fourth Amendment issue,” said David Gray, an associate law professor at the University of Maryland’s Carey School of Law.  “That was the ground that the four-justice concurring opinion by Justice [Samuel] Alito was ready to reach, but the narrower ground identified by the Scalia majority didn’t need to get there, so it didn’t.”

This narrow ruling was not unusual, Gray explained.  Courts usually try to “reach the narrowest grounds for a decision” and, because the court did not believe that the larger issue was adequately presented, Gray believes it would have been “irresponsible” to extend the decision more broadly.

A whole new level of technology

The Jones decision was built off of the Fourth Amendment, which protects “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures… [unless] upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation.”  Over time, the amendment has been understood to assert the necessity of a search warrant before law enforcement can begin a search of people or property.

While the U.S. government did concede that officers had violated the terms of the warrant, the lawyers argued that GPS tracking did not require a warrant, citing previous cases that ruled placing a homing beacon on a car did not require a warrant.  However, the defense asserted that GPS technology was exponentially more intrusive than the homing beacons, which essentially allowed police to track the beacon only when they were within its line of sight.

“This is an exceptional form of technology in terms of what resources have been available to law enforcement in the past,” said Kendall Burman, a senior national security fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology.  “They are able to track individuals and cars in this instant without the use of human beings.”

The third party doctrine

Because Scalia’s ruling stated that the “government physically occupied private property, questions continue to arise in regards to “nonintrusive” searches.

The Supreme Court’s third party doctrine outlined in United States v. Miller explains that citizens cannot expect privacy protection under the Fourth Amendment over information they disclose to a third party.  When coupled with the growing amount of location information collected by private companies, this doctrine allows companies to use this information however they see fit.

Graphic by Ben Kamisar

John Villasenor, a senior fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, said that as private companies continue to amass mountains of information on the general public, location tracking without a “physical search” that would require a warrant under the U.S. v. Jones is already becoming less relevant

“Technology has changed so much that a lot of us have our locations tracked anyway without a warrant, so the issue of before-the-fact warrants will, in many cases, be less important than it was even when the events that led to Jones started,” he said.  “…The location data to track you and me and almost everyone else is already stored somewhere.  The question is, [who can] go and get it.”

As of March, a Pew Internet report found that 46 percent of American adults use a smart phone.  These devices, which mostly run on operating systems created by Apple or Google, collect location data which is aggregated and stored by the company.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor addressed the issue of the third party doctrine in her concurrence, where she mentioned the possibility of reviewing the doctrine.   Burman said that she was “heartened” to see Sotomayor question this doctrine and hopes that the court will address situations where people are not intending to lift the “veil of privacy” from their activities.

“I think the concurrence really draws that doctrine into question,” she said.  “The strength of [Justice] Sotomayor’s concurrence along with [Justice] Alito’s suggests that there is a real opportunity to reevaluate what the third party doctrine means.”

But while Gray understands the need to re-evaluate the doctrine, he believes that the current doctrine “reflects a pre-existing assessment [of] the proper balancing of interests under the Fourth Amendment” between private rights and the ability of law enforcement to perform their duties.  In his view, there are many legitimate circumstances in which law enforcement should be able to work with private companies. As a hypothetical example, he cited  a social network company turning evidence of criminal activity to the police on its own accord.

“If you had a broad rule that any information that was detected and aggregated by a private company could not be shared with government without violating the Fourth Amendment, then you would essentially be building this artificial wall that would dramatically limit the ability for law enforcement to get involved in circumstances we would like them to get involved,” he said.  “It’s going will be hard to make the case that building an artificial wall best serves the proper balance.”

Programmer Arun Thampi discovered last week that Path, a social journal application, downloaded his entire iPhone address book, including names, phone numbers and email addresses, without his consent. Path executives responded by explaining that the data were used as part of a method to find other users on the network. They have since promised to delete the data and improve the transparency of their app.

Path, however, is far from the only social media app that downloads information without permission, according to a Los Angeles Times interview with Path CEO Dave Morin. Morin said downloading information this way “is currently the industry best practice and the App Store guidelines do not specifically discuss contact information.”

Twitter, a much more prominent social media network than Path, uses similar data collecting practices. According to the Times, Twitter executives confirmed that the “find friends” feature on the Twitter mobile app allows the company to download users’ entire address books, including email addresses and phone numbers, and  store them for up to 18 months.

On the Twitter mobile app, the “find friends” feature allows a user to “scan your contacts for people you already know on Twitter,” but does not inform users that their address book information is being downloaded.

In a statement, Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner said new updates on the app would add transparency to the downloading process by “updating the language associated with Find Friends — to be more explicit. In place of ‘Scan your contacts,’ we will use “Upload your contacts” and “Import your contacts.”

The Path news also  brought scrutiny of Apple for its policy regarding apps that download user information. According to The Washington Post, the Android version of Path warned users about the information collection, while the Apple version did not.

The New York Times reported that according to Lookout, a mobile security company, more than 10 percent of free apps in the iTunes store had access to user contacts.

“What separates malicious use from legitimate use is the element of surprise. If a user is surprised, that’s a problem,” Kevin Mahaffey, Lookout’s chief technology officer, told The New York Times.

In response to these issues, Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and G.K. Butterfield, D-N.C., both members of the House Energy and Commerce committee, sent a letter to Apple questioning the implications of the company’s privacy standards.

The letter said the discovery of Path receiving information “raises questions about whether Apple’s iOS app developer policies and practices may fall short when it comes to protecting the information of iPhone users and their contacts,” according to Reuters.

An Apple spokesman responded by suggesting that apps that collect user data without permission violate Apple guidelines, according to Reuters.

“We’re working to make this even better for our customers, and as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release,” the spokesman told Reuters.