Going Dark, and the era of law enforcement hacking

	Going Dark, and the era of law enforcement hacking(blog.cryptographyengineering.com)
	455 points by vslira 7 days ago \| 245 comments
	tl;dr: AI-powered vulnerability discovery tools are rapidly closing off the remotely exploitable bugs that law enforcement and intelligence agencies have relied on for the past decade to bypass encryption, since the FBI's "Going Dark" era effectively ended when hacking tools like GrayKey and Pegasus filled the gap. As this offensive capability dries up over the next few years, agencies will likely renew pressure on vendors to build intentional backdoors into their systems. The perverse result: the US may weaken its own software just as it was finally becoming genuinely secure, exposing infrastructure to foreign adversaries.
	HN Discussion: ↓AI-generated code and sloppy development will keep producing new bugs faster than they can be found ~Law enforcement was never truly 'going dark' given surveillance cameras and metadata availability ↓Governments cannot realistically prevent going dark in a democracy as users will migrate to dark networks •Historical context on wiretapping shows surveillance has always evolved with technology ↓Backdoors already exist covertly through gag orders, so the public pressure narrative misses the point