In recent testimony before Congress, the director of the FBI has again highlighted what the government sees as the problem of easy-to-use, on-by-default, strong encryption.

In prepared remarks from last Thursday, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that encryption presents a "significant challenge to conducting lawful court-ordered access," he said, again using the longstanding government moniker "Going Dark."

The statement was just one portion of his testimony about the agency's priorities for the coming year.

The FBI and its parent agency, the Department of Justice, have recently stepped up public rhetoric about the so-called dangers of "Going Dark." In recent months, both Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein have given numerous public statements about this issue.

Wray said:

In fiscal year 2017, the FBI was unable to access the content of approximately 7,800 mobile devices using appropriate and available technical tools, even though there was legal authority to do so. This figure represents slightly over half of all the mobile devices the FBI attempted to access in that timeframe... Where, at all possible, our agents develop investigative workarounds on a case-by-case basis, including by using physical world techniques and examining non-content sources of digital information (such as metadata). As an organization, the FBI also invests in alternative methods of lawful engineered access.

This "lawful engineered access" seemingly refers in part to the FBI's office, known as the National Domestic Communications Assistance Center (NDCAC), which actively provides technical assistance to local law enforcement in high-profile cases.

NDCAC's most recently published minutes were from May 2017. In them, the agency said that one of its goals is to make such commercial tools, like Cellebrite's services, " more widely available " to state and local law enforcement. Earlier this year, the NDCAC provided money to Miami authorities to pay Cellebrite to successfully get into a seized iPhone in a local sextortion case.

The DOJ's position for what it has dubbed "responsible encryption" runs counter to the consensus of information security experts. They say that it is impossible to build the strongest encryption system possible that would also allow the government access under certain conditions.