It's never a good sign when you have to declare during a debate that "I really am not a maniac."

But that's what FBI director Jim Comey found himself saying in advance of his testimony to the senate on Wednesday where he once again argued that tech companies need to figure out a way to install backdoors in all their communications tools so that there's never an email, text or phone call that the US government can't get its hands on.

Ever since Apple commendably announced last September that it would increase the security protecting millions of iPhones so that only the user - and not the company - would be able to unlock them, Comey has spent months arguing that this could spell disaster for the FBI trying to access what is on suspects' phones. Since then, other popular messaging services like WhatsApp have followed in Apple's footsteps and encrypted user's chats "end-to-end."