Dave Ross: It might be time to give the FBI the tools it needs

As French investigators try to track down the people who organized Friday’s attacks in Paris, we know this much: that the bad guys who hate Western Civilization so much sure do love our social media technology.

Here’s former CIA deputy director Mike Morell on “Face The Nation.”

“So I think, what we’re going to learn … is that these guys are communicating via these encrypted apps. The commercial encryption, which is very difficult if not impossible for governments to break, and the producers of which don’t produce the keys necessary for law enforcement to read the encrypted messages.”

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You see what that means is all that spy technology that Edward Snowden revealed is now useless when it comes to spying on the people we all agree should be spied on.

FBI Director James Comey saw it coming when he testified to Congress back in July.

“If you want to talk to a terrorist, they’re right there on Twitter direct messaging for you to communicate with,” he said.

So they recruit publicly on Twitter, preferably radicalizing people who already live in the country they want to attack. And when they have their convert: “Our investigators often lose them, because they move to a mobile messaging app that is encrypted end to end.”

They go dark. And so, as a result, the French authorities had no clue those nice young men were making bombs.

Since the Snowden revelations, privacy groups have stood firmly in support of unbreakable encryption to keep law enforcement in the dark.

Comey warned Congress back in July that would be a mistake.

“The FBI is not some alien force imposed upon the United States,” he said. “The tools we have are only tools given to us by the American people, through this Congress. I am finding that the tools we are being asked to use are increasingly ineffective in our national security work and in our criminal work. And I think my job is to tell folks about that so we can talk about it.”

That was last July. It might be time to have that talk now, don’t you think?