Abdulrasheed Bawa, chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), said that cryptocurrencies have become a preference for persons engaged in illegal financial transactions.
Meanwhile, El Salvador has become the first country to adopt Bitcoin as official currency. Also, Ukraine has legalized #bitcoin and #cryptocurrencies. Does it mean that Ecuador and Ukraine are accepting or encouraging illegal transactions by adopting and legalizing crypto currency?
The battle between privacy and security is an age-old battle. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world are always looking for opportunities to do away with privacy or technologies that enhance privacy. See the FBI–Apple encryption dispute. They argue that privacy enhancing technologies, such as encryption, impede or make their work of securing lives and property difficult or impossible. So does it mean that the death of privacy will make us more secure?
In the US, the FBI has severally claimed that
they are "going dark", that is to say that crime busting and
investigation is being hampered by the increasing use or adoption of encryption
by tech consumers. In other words, the FBI and other law enforcement and
intelligence agencies have been claiming for years that the increased use of
encryption by consumers is making surveillance and lawful interception much
more difficult and impeding investigations.
However, recent events have shown that the claim
of going dark is over exaggerated. On May 22, 2018, the Washington
Post reported that the FBI repeatedly cited inflated statistics about the
number of cellphones whose data it could not access because of encryption.
Also in June, 2021, it was reported that for
three years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Australian Federal
Police owned and operated a commercial encrypted phone app, called AN0M, that
was used by organized crime around the world. In other words, instead of the
FBI trying to break encryption or hack into devices, they created an encrypted phone
app and put it out there and some criminals felt the phone app was secure and
their communications were end to end encrypted, whereas, law enforcement agents
had access to all their communications which were supposed to be encrypted and
unreadable or inaccessible to third parties. With this, can you say the law
enforcement and intelligence agencies are really going dark? See: The FBI's
Anom Stunt Rattles the Encryption Debate.
In view of the above, the Chairman's claim might just be
another ploy by a law enforcement agency to try chirp away at privacy and
anonymity as law enforcements are wont to do, while hiding under the guise of
fighting crime.
Further reading:
(1) Going Dark, Going Forward: A Primer On The Encryption Debate
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