“Unfortunately, the law hasn’t kept pace with technology, and this disconnect has created a significant public safety problem,” he said.

In a speech at the Brookings Institution, Comey warned that crimes could go unsolved if law enforcement cannot gain access to information that companies like Apple and Google are protecting with increasingly sophisticated encryption.

WASHINGTON — The director of the FBI, James B. Comey, said Thursday that federal laws should be changed to require telecommunications companies to give law enforcement agencies access to the encrypted communications of individuals suspected of crimes.

Comey said that he hoped to spur Congress to update the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which requires phone companies to build in an ability to immediately begin wiretapping if presented with a court order.


Online services like Gmail or Facebook are not covered by that law. The FBI has been pushing since at least 2010 to expand the law so that they would be covered by the same mandate, warning that its ability to carry out wiretap orders is “going dark.”

One aspect of the FBI’s concern has been startup companies, many of which have not built intercept capabilities into their products. That can cause delays when they receive an order. For their part, the startups say that building in such capabilities is costly and could attract malicious hackers.

A separate but related question is whether companies should be permitted to build communications systems that are encrypted end to end, so that the providers are not able to unscramble them even if presented with a lawful wiretap order..

“Those charged with protecting our people aren’t always able to access the evidence we need to prosecute crime and prevent terrorism, even with lawful authority,” he said. “We have the legal authority to intercept and access communications and information pursuant to court order, but we often lack the technical ability to do so.”


The battle between Silicon Valley and the intelligence community over information gathering, which had been simmering for 20 years, escalated last month after Apple said it would roll out new encryption for the iPhone that would prevent even Apple from gaining access to customer information.

Comey cited the new iPhone as a sign that encryption might be getting out of hand, although he stopped short of saying that any revision of the surveillance law should require manufacturers to build back doors into the encryption technology used to protect data stored on devices. In the 1990s, the FBI pushed for such back doors but lost that debate.

Comey did, however, say that the law’s revision should require communications providers to be able to unscramble messages if presented with a court order. That would not require building back doors into encryption, but would require the providers to be able to unscramble the messages.

Gmail, for example, encrypts emails as they flow from users’ computers to Google’s servers, stores them in plain text on its servers, and then encrypts them again as they are sent over the network to recipients. But some services encrypt the contents of messages from start to finish, so the firms pass on the messages but cannot read them or turn them over in plain-text form to law enforcement.

Comey said he thought that should not be permitted, bringing him back to the position held by the FBI before reports surfaced last year about extensive electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency, based on documents leaked by former intelligence agency contractor Edward Snowden.


Silicon Valley executives were enraged by revelations from Snowden’s files that the NSA was not just asking companies to hand over data through secret court orders but also gathering information through the “back door” — breaking into their data centers and stealing encryption keys, or gathering data as it flowed in unencrypted form.