As was widely expected, FBI Director James Comey appeared before two separate Senate Committees yesterday — the Judiciary and the Intelligence Committees — to talk about the „risks“ of „going dark“ if the government is not allowed to backdoor encryption. You can watch the Judiciary Committee hearing and the Intelligence Committee hearing at those two links. I‘d embed the videos here on Techdirt as well, but I can‘t because (guess what?) neither offers an encrypted HTTPS version, so they wouldn‘t appear on our site, since we force HTTPS connections.

Most of Comey‘s comments were pretty much what you‘d expect him to say, with a few clear themes repeated over and over again: