FBI's Comey: 'There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America'

“There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America,” the FBI director, James Comey, has declared after the disclosure of a range of hacking tools used by the CIA, reported The Guardian.

Comey was delivering prepared remarks at a cybersecurity conference in Boston, but his assessment has deepened privacy concerns already raised by the details of CIA tools to hack consumer electronics for espionage published by WikiLeaks on Tuesday.

 “All of us have a reasonable expectation of privacy in our homes, in our cars, and in our devices. But it also means with good reason, in court, government, through law enforcement, can invade our private spaces,” Comey said at the conference. “Even our memories aren’t private. Any of us can be compelled to say what we saw … In appropriate circumstances, a judge can compel any of us to testify in court on those private communications.”

Fresh concerns over personal privacy arose after WikiLeaks published what it called the first tranche of a larger body of data about CIA hacking, which it says was provided to the organisation by a whistleblower seeking to trigger a debate on the issue.
The Democratic congressman Ted Lieu called for a congressional investigation into how the data came to be stolen and the wisdom of the intelligence agencies in withholding knowledge about vulnerabilities in consumer software from manufacturers.
“If these documents are true, it means the CIA arsenal of cyber weapons is now out there in the public domain, and who knows who now has access to some very intrusive hacking tools,” Lieu told The Guardian. “It is very disturbing to anyone who cares about privacy … It should also put to rest any argument about encryption back doors. You can’t just give encryption keys to the good guys and hope they don’t get to the bad guys. Our best protection is to have no security defects in the products we use.”
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