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Prosecutors Op-Ed: Phone Encryption Blocks Justice
New submitter DaDaDaaaaa writes: The New York Times features a joint op-ed piece by prosecutors from Manhattan, Paris, London and Spain, in which they decry the default use by Apple and Google of full disk encryption in their latest smartphone OSes (iOS 8 and Android Lollipop, respectively). They talk about the murder scene of a father of six, where an iPhone 6 and a Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge were found.
"An Illinois state judge issued a warrant ordering Apple and Google to unlock the phones and share with authorities any data therein that could potentially solve the murder. Apple and Google replied, in essence, that they could not — because they did not know the user's passcode. The homicide remains unsolved. The killer remains at large."
They make a case for lawmakers to force Apple and Google to include backdoors into their smartphone operating systems. One has to wonder about the legitimate uses of full disk encryption, which can protect good people from harm, and them from having their privacy needlessly intruded upon.
"An Illinois state judge issued a warrant ordering Apple and Google to unlock the phones and share with authorities any data therein that could potentially solve the murder. Apple and Google replied, in essence, that they could not — because they did not know the user's passcode. The homicide remains unsolved. The killer remains at large."
They make a case for lawmakers to force Apple and Google to include backdoors into their smartphone operating systems. One has to wonder about the legitimate uses of full disk encryption, which can protect good people from harm, and them from having their privacy needlessly intruded upon.
That if they knew what was on the phone they'd be able to nab the murderer.
You can leave a trail of blood all the way back to your Rockingham estate, and still get away with it.
There's significant (and mixed) legal precedent regarding someone being ordered to give a password that will decrypt data that will incriminate them. If the courts would not be entitled to this password from the phone's owner (due to Fifth amendment protections) then it's not quite just to claim they have a right to it prior to his/her capture.
This article seemed like a balanced view on the subject:
http://politicsandpolicy.org/a...
Lol passcode ? thats it?... just try them all geeeeeeez...............
The victim's own phones would probably be of little value in determining who attacked him, assuming a crime of opportunity.
Or did the killer randomly leave behind two cellphones?
The way the argument is framed is predicated on the phones likely to be useful in solving the homicide, but they conveniently omit saying that they're not the victim's phones or some other known party.
Phones are used to communicate. How about identifying the carrier, going to the carrier with a subpoena for the ownership information and communications logs, and go from there?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Imagine how much swifter and more efficient Justice would be if law enforcement had a key that gave them access to every home in their country.
There is no proof there is any evidence on the phones.
HOWEVER, there is a ton of evidence that authorities will abuse their legal authority and spy on innocent people.
Whats next, getting rid of trials because the law knows that some guilty people have been found innocent, and the few innocent who have been found guilt are just collateral damage.
I was going to rewrite TFS as LEO's blocking Justice by not wearing always-on cameras & microphones, but it seemed like too much effort. So have this sentence instead.
Who knows what's 'on' that phone? However, the same judge should be able to provide a warrant for the ISP records where they can get full call, sms, and voicemail history. Also, depending on what he was doing on the phone - they may be able to get location data.
Why not start there and then come back to the device when you've run out of other options.
leaving us with a morrissette chomsky thomas olsen quorum? anyone know whois parked on alphabet.com? tears~innocence~truth~mercy = justice not enough digits? select the violent punishment for others we would choose for ourselves?
I find it hard to believe that invasive access to a smart phone is the only way to solve a crime, murder 1 or otherwise.
It seems I got a valid reason to buy a newer phone now then. :)
They can thank some of federal law enforcement for driving Google, Apple, etc. to go this route. They wanted warrant-less access, the companies didn't like it and they felt they had no choice but to protect against it to ensure no access for anyone.
Lots of things "hinder" justice. The fact that we don't all wear trackers that inform the government of where we are at all times hinders justice. The fact that all financial transactions aren't conducted electronically hinders justice. The fact I can go wherever I want without first obtaining permission from the government hinders justice.
The fact that I don't have to submit to those intrusions is part of my freedom. I appreciate my freedom and am willing to forgo or more efficient justice system in order to maintain my freedom - especially given the fact that once freedom is sufficiently curtailed those doing the curtailing tend to lose their concern for justice.
I wonder how they ever solved crimes before the invention of a personalized spy machine.
I'd laugh if the phones were just full of cat pictures.
In all seriousness, I suppose it is harder now that people don't keep notebooks for contact lists any more. I should take such problems as a way of endorsing the use of those products compared to others.
The government wouldn't have such problems if they didn't throw away the trust they once had. Keep trying to think of when they had trust, and only end up thinking of old tv shows. I suppose if they had trust, depends on the situation of the individual: Pre/Post Civil Rights, Suffrage, etc.
It would go far if the police realize that they aren't hired to bring justice, the courts are. They are employed only to stop active crimes, resolve past crimes, and help bring peace to reduce further crimes. If they stopped trying to bring "justice" to people and got a proper warrant for their actions, then their public stock would certainly rise.
I see no reason to believe that there is anything on the phones that would lead to the murderer that the police couldn't already have. They can identify the owners of the phone without unlocking them. The chance there is further evidence like a video or picture seems abysmally low since I would guess that a suspect that saw themselves being recorded, or thought they might have been, would have taken/smashed the phones.
The fact that the phones were not taken as part of a 'robbery' seems suspicious as well.
One has to wonder about the legitimate uses of full disk encryption, which can protect good people from harm, and them from having their privacy needlessly intruded upon.
No one doesn't. There's nothing to wonder about, at least in the US. The fourth amendment is pretty damn clear.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Wow, just imagine a world in which police are able to solve murder cases. Truly, this is an idea who's time has come. It will change the world! No longer will police simply be relegated to issuing parting and speeding tickets. /s
As TWX states above, they can go to the carrier and get call/location/sms logs. Do they think that the killer left them a video note on the phone?
But still I feel the need to say it. “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
I think I might have some small sympathy for the idea that law enforcement should have some recourse to access the contents of a cell phone, provided they first get a warrant. However, in light of what we've learned about the NSA spying, I don't see how anyone could trust that such a back door won't be abused. Really, building any kind of backdoor is a serious security risk, since any backdoor that the "good guys" can use also carries a risk that the "bad guys" will discover it. But beyond all the normal security risks, we now know that our this kind of access has been abused by various forms of law enforcement in ways that are ethically questionable if not illegal.
So... sorry. You no longer deserve the benefit of the doubt. If you wanted our good faith, you shouldn't have secretly abused the system.
Why don't they just get a warrant to ask the owner for the password?
Or just ask the service provider for call logs?
Or is this just some random phone that they want to use on a fishing expedition?
Encryption, in and of itself, is for everyone. The government is neither entitled to better encryption than Joe Sixpack, nor is the government entitled to backdoors that can be used by criminals to break in as soon as they're known...which, given the black-hat hacker community, won't take very long.
If the government *gets a warrant*, they can coerce the owner of the phone to unlock it for use as evidence. As it is, "stingrays" and NSA taps on our communications allow the government to intercept private communications *without* a warrant.
If we're not allowed to encrypt our phones, tablets, and hard drives because it makes it harder for law enforcement, then pretty soon it will be illegal to own front doors that can't be knocked down with a LEO battering ram, or locks that can't be opened by LEO at the push of a button...and criminals will soon have the button (hackers have already broken the security of garage door openers, wireless car starters, and hacked into car control systems; I suppose you say that we can't put better encryption on *those* because of LEO?)
We need to curtail the government's intrusion, not make it bigger. 9/11 started a dangerous trend of fighting terrorism by shackling law-abiding citizens, bit by bit.
I know it's printed on the back of an iPhone. I'm sure that could have been used to track down who the phone belonged to.
Security and privacy are opposites. The more we have of one, the less we have of the other. Any mother tempted to look inside their teenager's diary knows this.
The question is not and never has been, could we obtain more security by giving up some privacy.
Instead the question is, what issues are so substantial that an invasion of privacy is required - and how large an invasion would that be.
The proposed invasion of privacy - a back door in every single phones - where like it or not, people keep nude photos, sexy text messages, GPS data, contact information, etc. etc. is HUGE. The proposed security enhancement is minor.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Not to discount murder, but people are going to murder each other whether or not police are permitted to access decrypted data on phones. Murdering are civil rights and privacy will be a lot harder with encryption.
The backdoor could be an option for the user.
Pros:
- Help give a hand to police to solve your potential murder (assuming the phone helps).
Cons:
- Reduced to no security for a number of scenarios, including but not limited to: backdoor procedure becoming known, spy agencies certainly having "backdoor" deals with vendors, etc.
Your choice!
Around the world, tech company executives rub their hands in glee at the thought of all the profits coming there way after the US government destroy any remaining trust in the US industry.
You know what else blocks justice? Whispering to someone. If the cops are trying to listen to your conversation and you whisper it, they can't record it easily. Whispering should be illegal.
Outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.
I prepared some bullet points for you:
a.) The right to remain silent .. .. .. .. .. ..
b.) An execelent lawyer
c.) An accused non-black person
d.) The right not to be tortured
e.) A non-coloured or coloured rich person
f.) The right for a due proccess
Now who wants to play attorney general bingo and wants to degrade freedom and civil rights a lot more?
Btw. for option e. I think about an ex-football player & comedy actor - there is another chance for bingo .. it has something to do with professional athelete and the processecution of crimes. (Einstein - James Dean - Brooklyns got a winning team .. children of thaledomite)
Both sides of the debate have their specific cases where encryption is either the "best thing ever" or the "worst thing ever." For every unsolved murder, there is also a life saved. The US legal system is predicated on the fact that a) "we get it right most of the time," and b) when we're not sure, we err on the side of the defendant. The reality is that there are both legitimate and illegitimate uses for encryption - just like guns, hammers, knives, cars, crowbars, and any other tool you can think of. What law enforcement NEEDS is not what it is asking for. What it NEEDS is way to decrypt anything related to a crime. That is not currently technically feasible. So, they ask to be able to decrypt EVERYTHING. But, once we give them EVERYTHING, it will be impossible to get them to accept only what they really NEED. We need to balance a person's right of privacy with the government's need to know. Right now, it's all or nothing (if you're using encryption and ALL if you don't). I personally believe it is too soon to give them the right to have access to all communications in all forums. Some things need to remain private. There may come a day when it is technically feasible to give them what they need - access to any communications about "murder X" or "kidnapping Y" without giving them access to every communication about everything. Until that day happens, people should have the right to have their communications encrypted if they choose with the assumption of privacy.
What was it that William Blackstone said? "It is better that ten innocent persons suffer than that one guilty person escape".
So, yeah, go ahead. Give up some essential liberty in exchange for temporary safety. Everyone throughout history has always said that that is a good idea.
Don't want to know any of your own history? That's okay. Like some guy on TV said, "Those who cannot learn from history are just too awesome for it, so that's okay."
It is not anybody else's job. It's not the defendant's, it's not Apple's, and it's certainly not the victim's.
Yeah, putting a camera on everyone's head recording 24/7 will stop a lot of crime. Think of all the actions that are being kept SECRET from the government, just like encryption does. Hell, a person should be required to write down all their thoughts in a journal and submit a copy to the government every week, because keeping stuff in your head is like encryption as we can't extract thoughts and memories directly from brains.
Well maybe if you hadn't abused your positions to extract personal information for decades on innocent individuals for no justifiable reason you wouldn't be in this boat. We've gone well past the point where courts/police/prosecutors can be trusted to keep their hands out of the cookie jar, so this is what we are stuck with. What is that old saying, "better that 10 guilty people go free than one innocent person be convicted"? Well here's one for the digital age "better 10 clues to a crime be lost then leave vulnerable 50 million peoples privacy to baseless government intrusion"
Our prosecutors are notorious for doing things like ignoring the Brady Rule. Why the hell should we listen to their whining and complaining about how others should "think of the public good" when they, themselves, often cannot even be bothered to follow the law in ways that gets innocent people convicted.
If we can't have pervasive access to all data at all times, the terrorists win!
public: prosecutorial overreach contributed to the death of Aaron Schwartz
proescutors: yeah,but he was a ruthless hacker.
public it has built an unsustainable prison population, ensures perpetual incarceration, and disproportionately targets minorities and poor people.
prosecutors: these people had the drugs, so were technically fighting a war on the drugs. mission success.
public The average american breaks 3 laws per day, and if youre incapable of bail or restitution youre sent to prison for your debt. the united states leads the world in total citizens incarcerated.
prosecutors:If you cant do the time, dont do the crime.
Google: hey guise we heard u like privacy...
Apple: ditto. iPrivacy. it werks.
Prosecutors: phone encryption makes my job hard. turn it off.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Seriously. Here is a little history lesson for the august prosecutors from Manhattan, Paris, London and Spain
No matter where you set the bar, some cases will remain unsolved.
There is no procedure, no matter how heinous or how intrusive, that couldn't be justified on these terms. Come up with other reasons for what you want; this one is no real reason at all.
The government hides many of its crimes by classifying and encrypting data. Would the same prosecutors support decryption and declassification of much of the government data based on the fact that it is being used to hide crime?
Even if he had proof that the murderer would be caught if they got into the phone, it wouldn't change anything. We could also prove that the murderer would be caught if every human was issued a body-cam and the penalty for not maintaining it properly was death. Just because something catches murderers doesn't mean it should be done.
what is new now you need a smartphone to resolve a criminal case?
no time, not enough resources? Men of justice are "officials/lazy"...
We must understand that numerical life must become a cage to make automatic surveillance and Punishment: to prevent crime...
think like this is : no way
of course, users of Silk Road / Bit torrent / TOR / insert other e-criminal service here ARE IN FACT completely unbiased when arguing for zero law enforcement access to any digital device ever, rite?
--LT (having earned -1 Karma through display of basic human intelligence on Slashdot)
"An Illinois state judge issued a warrant ordering Apple and Google to unlock the phones and share with authorities any data therein that could potentially solve the murder. Apple and Google replied, in essence, that they could not — because they did not know the user's passcode. The homicide remains unsolved. The killer remains at large."
They could probably solve even more cases if they had the ability to remotely decrypt and access the contents of everyone's cell phone. They could solve *even more* cases if they were able to search anyone's property without a warrant.
What if we just put everyone in prison. It'll be pretty hard for anyone to commit crimes from inside a jail cell.
I suppose it's easy for some people to fall into the mindset that crime prevention is the *only* thing that matters.
They don't appear to have made a case *why* decrypting cellphones would help solve the crime. Who did they belong to? If they're owned by victim its unlikely they include much of value or they'd be smashed (and merely taking them to the home router while charged will probably backup to the cloud, where a warrant will help you). Otherwise, go talk to the carrier and get a warrant to find the devices owners. Heck, I imagine Apple & Google could determine which cloud accounts are linked to the device.
The data on the phone both contains the solution to the murder, and nothing that could lead to the solution to the murder.
Cops will often search and eavesdrop without a warrant and then parallel construct their way into "legitimately" arresting someone.
This is completely illegal, but even if you catch the cops red-handed the only remedy is exclusion of the evidence. More often it's just impossible to detect when it's happened. Typically the only sign is that your client falls victim to a terrible coincidence- just as he is driving around with some evidence on him, the cops will just happen to stumble upon him making a turn without signaling and the car that did the stop happened to be a K-9 unit, etc. You never learn about how they knew to stop him in the first place because of course that would get all the evidence thrown out.
The fact that law enforcement is bitching and moaning so loudly about full device encryption tells me that it is probably working and that they are dreading actually having to do their jobs.
Essentially, they're whining for a back door into every car, house, secure diary and safe. It's up to them to lawfully "break" into them. It's not our problem nor Apple's, Google's that they don't have the technology to do so.
Our justice system of courts, judges, prosecutors are so out of touch with the advances in technology, that they are now acting like a bunch of rabid clerics calling for the good ol days of where they could simply tap into Ma Bell and listen to anyone, or "simply" break down the front door.
This is what happens when you have "highly educated" but "untalented" people in authority running the show. People who with that education would be simple farmers.
Information and Knowledge is power. Don't let them take that from you !!
First, there is a way to do so. Second, we need MORE encryption not less, because authorities violate constitutional rights as standard procedure.
What did they do before smartphones even existed?
The right to remain silent is just as much of a roadblock. These arguments are tantamount to arguing for the need to beat confessions out of suspects. None of these people should be serving in the legal field in any capacity, never mind as prosecutors.
We need to curtail the government's intrusion, not make it bigger. 9/11 started a dangerous trend of fighting terrorism by shackling law-abiding citizens, bit by bit.
And governments around the world are taking bigger bytes every day.
And the content of the phones is guaranteed to prove who-dun-it?
Where is Bennett Haselton when you need him?
If there is a backdoor, it will be used by a range of players, not just law enforcement.
Security is problematic enough already without deliberately engineering weaknesses.
The idea a backdoor will be used and only used by the designated authorities is a fantasy held by the non-technical who are inappropriately applying non-technical expectations to a technical issue.
I would also say that in our modern world, which provides to us wholly new capabilities - such as storing most of our life in a single, easily accessable location - providing the State wih generalized access has wholly new consequences and risks, of an entirely different order to that which we are accustomed to before for the same granting of such powers.
Our mass privacy is I think not wisely traded to make the job of law enforcement easier, both for those cases with legitimate and unquestionable need, such as that given in this example, but also in those myriad of cases where the law is both wrong, stupid, unethical and harmful. In this latter matter, the inability of the State to fully enforce law has been one of its saving graces.
The potential for misuse of backdoors it too great. Especially when there is access to Googles data mining.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/...
It looks like they have at least one eye witnesses (someone was observed fleeing the scene). Further, any communications to or from the devices would be recorded by the phone company (or ISP for wireless communications). So what are they hoping to find on the devices? A typed confession from the murderer?
There in no religion higher than truth.
And this kind of thing is why today they're holding secret hearings on spying on Canadian citizens illegally in Canada, at the court in Vancouver BC.
Secrecy is only a threat when you spy on people.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If the government *gets a warrant*, they can coerce the owner of the phone to unlock it for use as evidence.
I believe that is only true of Biometric security (for some unfathomable reason). IIRC, you cannot be ordered to divulge a password for your phone.
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As soon as they agree that every elected politician/bureaucrat/police man/etc. has one of these phones that the public can ask for a Non-denyable FOIA request to get all of the data off of it.
Now we simply FOIA the entire thing - wrap it up on a fully searchable wiki site and have access to what our politicians are really doing
I don't think too many of them would want their phones accessible this way, so why should I?
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
We need to curtail the government's intrusion, not make it bigger. 9/11 started a dangerous trend of fighting terrorism by shackling law-abiding citizens, bit by bit.
Because that was the real reason behind 9/11. The gummint tried to sell their bill-of-goods with the Oklahoma City "Terrorist Attack"; but Congress didn't bite. But they sure bit, and bit hard on 9/11.
Don't get me started... 2000+ pages of the USAPATRIOTACT supposedly written, proofread, and voted-on in less than two weeks?!? Yeahrightsure. I couldn't mash on the keyboard and get 2,000 pages of asdfjkl; typed in that much time!
They didn't have that all ready-to-go before those planes ever left the ground. No. Of course not...
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10 years ago there was no way to get justice and find the killer since smartphones weren't common? It's a miracle any crime was solved without these magic phones laying around.
Once it becomes public knowledge that there is such a key that opens all digital locks, murderers will simply work their way around it by avoiding these things.
Crimes were committed before smartphones and they can be committed even without them.
Where will prosecutors go next? We cannot solve crimes with backdoors, so let us put cctv cameras and watch everyone real time?
Or will they pass a law requiring all murderers and criminals to visit their nearest LEO to register their crimes so that LEO can do their jobs.
Giving back doors to your government will not solve crimes or make their jobs easier. It just gives them more power which can be abused in unrelated events and circumstances.
If not for you damned kids and your "4th Amendment"!!!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
We'll do that. Once you install a door into your home that has no more than a simple tumbler lock with police having the key to it and you having no provision whatsoever to monitor when this door opens. Also any and all security systems you might have have to turn off as soon as this door is opened. The police may of course only use that key with a warrant. No worries about this.
Once you've done that, we can talk. And if you say "hey, that's stupid, anyone with a hint of a burglary skill could break the lock and my home would be wide open". Yeaaaaaaah, you got it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Lots of things "hinder" justice. The fact that we don't all wear trackers that inform the government of where we are at all times hinders justice.
Bad example. We do. They're called "cellphones" and the government collects "metadata" and operates "stingrays."
All my computers and smartphones have full disk encryption enabled. I don't want thieves to have the ability to play with my data. How is that not a perfectly legitimate use? I travel frequently and if my phone or laptop was stolen, without encryption, a thief could extract all the data, steal my identity and make my life a living hell. Also currently in Canada when you cross the border you can have your devices confiscated. If the agents want to inspect them and are unable to they will then be sent to Ottawa, where the border services will attempt to forensically extract data from the drive to look for "evidence". When you're at the border your protections against unreasonable searches are no more. Suppose I go to a tropical country and the border agents want to inspect the devices of every single man who comes back out to look for evidence allowing them to catch pedophiles who engaged in child sexual tourism. They will not find anything about you, but they will surely find some material somewhere that could be constructed as damaging. Or suppose you visited 4chan and on it where was a lolicon avatar that was loaded without your knowledge and it is still in your browser cache, it could be potentially illegal in your legislature. There are many ways where this can backfire against you. This is why I fully encrypt and wipe my devices before crossing the border and I advise everyone to do the same. We have so little privacy in this world, you can bet I will use encryption to protect my private life from prying eyes. These prosecutors can plead and gesticule all they want, however the genie is not getting back into the bottle.
The data is mine, period.
I don't care what the TOS says, I don't care what the laws say. And I certainly don't care for any arguments that rely on 'terrorism' or invading my privacy.
You won't get the device or any data it has on it, period. And if Apple or Google relent, I'll simply find another device.
You won't get my pin, or password, or encryption key, period, ever. Not from me. And if you try and take the device, I'll simply activate the self destruct and turn it to slag.
As I've said before, the government/law enforcement has nobody to blame but themselves for this. We tried to trust you to only look at private information that was vital to an investigation, AND with a warrant. But now that we know that you scoop up everything you can at look at whatever the hell you feel like at any time, warrants be damned, we can't trust our data to be un-encrypted around you people. Deal with it.
We need to tell them they are simply too corrupt to be trusted, and that's that. When they clean up their act and we get proper oversight, then we can talk. Until then, tough cookies. We'll just have to scramble everything the best we can and let them cry in their soup. If they don't like it, they can find another line of work, and we have to be more diligent in who we hire and vote for.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Finding an encrypted phone on a scene is not causation. Even most unencrypted phones do not have content instructive to the crime.
This is a logical dis-connect. It is an intellectual dis-connect.
The constitution provides protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Requesting the information on a phone or device to help solve a murder investigation is reasonable. The authorities have warrants. Tech companies should comply. If they can't comply due to their implementation then they are culpable of supporting illegal activity and the Feds should sue them into oblivion.
GPS location based on cell towers, actual sms messages, phone calls to and from the phone and probably a bunch of other stuff that the cellco is only too happy to provide. I'm sorry if the police can't do their job without accessing the users actual private data (such as game scores and alternate non-cell tower gps, and iMessages and app data) but there's nothing to suggest that the encrypted data would hold anything useful. not every murder is a Robert Ludlum plot.
Given how the laws around this were written into the constitution, it makes me suspect that the founding fathers were okay with unsolved criminal mysteries if that meant that the government couldn't become too powerful.
The monsters that rule over you LOVE to employ 'HAMMERS'. 'Hammers' are the tiny brained, tiny dick Human scum who both love to lord over ordinary people, and see ordinary people as either 'nails' or material for imminent future 'nails'. They are programmed at the deepest level to see NOTHING wrong with this philosophy, which is why the ruling elite recruit them and place them in position in the first place.
A 'nail' is a person MORONIC enough to argue about the merits of encryption. Non-nails know power is ALWAYS abused using these methods, regardless what that 'power' represents in the History of any given civilisation.
Universal education was invented and deployed to create societies of NAILS. Ordinary schooling in the West, for instance, lionises the FALSE arguments made by the hammers. And increasingly, the mob of nails are taught to turn on any that dare to challenge the authority of the hammers. That is what the mainstream press is for- that is what Dice uses this site for.
A GOOD little nail thinks 'free speech' means saying the kinds of things that hammers approve of. A good little nail thinks 'offensive' speech is clearly an ABUSE of free speech, and proof that Rights must have very clear limits defined by the hammers. And as Obama bombs the Human Rights freedom groups in Yemen on behalf of the unthinkably vile regime of Saudi Arabia, you had better know the hammers, and their masters, are most certainly WINNING.
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Imagine how many murderers it would be possible to catch early if everybody would have camera in his/her bedroom, directly connected to authorities! They can store recorded data in secure location and nobody would have access to it without judge order (sure). After all, security is most important.
What do you call someone so moronic that they want to classify everyone into neat categories like "hammer" and "nail"?
Here is a solution that prevents all murders and all crime: Just kill everybody. This could even be made law (it cannot be made legal without fundamental changes to the constitution though). Why is it still wrong? Simple: The gain is far, far inferior to the losses this brings with it.
So, if 6 people get murdered, and the job of the police to find the killers would be made a little easier by establishing a surveillance-state, is that a balanced solution? Rather obviously, it is not. And so is requiring everybody to use bad and insecure encryption just to make the police's job a bit easier in some cases. The problem here is that the police is unable to police itself. That is something that has been known for a very long time. It is no accident, that what comes out when the police gets what they want is called a "police state". In order to maintain freedom, the police always needs to have significant less power than it wants and significantly less funding than it desires. Otherwise things will get out of hand and the negative consequences for society will be drastic.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Freedom always comes with risks and one is some degree of unsolved crime. That is fine, a free society can withstand some crime being unsolved. On the other hand, a non-free society is about the worst form of human existence, and countless people have risked and given their lives to help establish free societies. It is really a very small evil (some unsolved crime) against an extremely large evil. And preventing people from using secure encryption is a huge step towards the large evil.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The authors of this paper picked the wrong person to try and play the empathy card with.
An unemployed man that had lost his job in late 2013 for a "Marijuana related" indecent that put him back in prison just happens to have multiple, top of the line, current gen, encrypted cell phones randomly kicking around his car?
That were not stolen..
While parked off of a main street where there were no eye witnesses...
And shot multiple times so even his mother believes it was "some kind of a hit"....
If it was just a random mugging/carjacking he would not have had time to unlock his phone to record. If he was involved in something illegal he probably would not be recording incriminating evidence of himself. So the chances of anything useful being on the phones is slim at best.
I have empathy for the children who lost their father.
I do not have empathy for a man with 6 kids to care for who was involved in criminal activity that has sent them to prison multiple times.
If the best example they could find for the removal of encryption on cell phones is a repeat convict that was most likely killed in some drug/gang related shooting they are really digging deep for an excuse to take away our freedoms.
In words of one syllable (well, I can't do anything about the fact that "Apple" and "Google" are two syllables, so the authors of the article will just have to pop an aspirin and such it up): The whole point is to stop that kind of data leak -- if Apple and Google don't have it, a bad guy can't steal it from them.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Smartphone encryption uses composite keys, made by combining the password the user punches in to gain access with a digital key baked into the phone. The latter is hard to extract by physical examination, and too strong to brute-force (256 bits, IIRC). Thus, an attack against an offloaded copy of the encrypted data is very difficult (effectively impossible if the attacker botches the attempt to extract the device key and burns it), and an attack against the user password alone can only be done on that device.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
The FCC is passing rules that make it illegal to flash your wireless routers and other devices with more secure and open firmware. They've already got these rules on cell phones and the rules are being extended to other wireless devices. Everything from bluetooth and PC wifi cards to routers are becoming black boxes. More people need to take a stand and fight this. Tell the FCC this is unacceptable:
http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2015/db0722/FCC-15-92A1.pdf
Move to liberty-friendly places where there are others willing to say no to government- and back that up with real action: http://www.freestateproject.org/
Isn't your liberty worth it?
The FCC has an open rulemaking proceeding that would expand these requirements beyond the 5 GHz U-NII devices covered by the OET document to all Part 15 devices. See paragraphs 45 and 46 on page 18 of the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (FCC 15-92):
We propose to modify the SDR-related requirements in Part 2 of our rules
based in part on the current Commission practices regarding software
configuration control. To minimize the potential for unauthorized
modification to the software that controls the RF parameters of the
device, we propose that grantees must implement well-defined measures to
ensure that certified equipment is not capable of operating with
RF-controlling software for which it has not been approved. [ . . . ]
We seek comment on these proposals.
http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2015/db0722/FCC-15-92A1.pdf
...but I believe Americans are overly obsessed with so-called privacy. Frankly there's nothing on my phone that the NSA or police dept would find interesting. If those agencies were able to prove they could keep the public safer by running algorithms looking for patterns associated with plots to do harm to others, I wouldn't mind them processing my data then purging it.
With strong encryption, users can opt IN to the level of sharing they want to give away. They can share their passcode with some escrow and publish that association in case it ever comes up.
The reason you don't have to divulge passwords is because doing so would be compelling people to be witnesses against themselves. The right to remain silent. That's completely different from biometric security, where you have freely made the choice to use it. There is no right to not disclose one's fingerprints or retina pattern.
...pretty soon it will be illegal to own front doors that can't be knocked down with a LEO battering ram...
Oh noes![pdf] Oops... never mind, it's Canada
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The reason you don't have to divulge passwords is because doing so would be compelling people to be witnesses against themselves. The right to remain silent. That's completely different from biometric security, where you have freely made the choice to use it. There is no right to not disclose one's fingerprints or retina pattern.
Then the trick, if you have time and an iPhone with a fingerprint sensor, is to force a shutdown. That way, when it is powered up again, it will REQUIRE a typed-in password; fingerprint won't do. Same thing if it has been a sufficient amount of time since the last login.
Don't be fooled, this makes a case maybe against E-Sim Cards?
Subject says it all.
I have little sympathy for the "no encryption allowed" crowd, but it does raise an interesting question of consent, these people didn't request that their phones be encrypted in this manner, if someone had asked them their preference what would they have chosen? I'm guessing with the benefit of hindsight they would have probably have left them unencrypted. I certainly worry slightly about what it means if I can't recover the data on one of my devices because of the encryption that has been installed that I didn't specifically ask for.
The phones belong to the victims.
At this point, it wouldn't surprise me if the prosecutors killed the family just to finally have a singular instance to justify their creeping police states. Think of the children!
The people who dish out 'justice' are notoriously unjustice and refuse to operate transparently.
Why would we accept an agenda that allows them to surveil the citizenry while they operate without oversight?
How can asymetric surveillance lead to anything vaguely representing justice when the enables the unilateral use of force and seizure of property?
"Trust but verify" isn't just for nation states any more.
These guys are assholes. Short-sighted, incapable of rational thought, oblivious to the likely consequences of the drivel they spout, and unconcerned with anything other than their grab at power. Despicable.
This:
>The homicide remains unsolved. The killer remains at large.
>Until very recently, this situation would not have occurred.
Wow, what an unjustified leap! The implication is that if only the could unlock the phones, they would be able to solve the crime. How, exactly? Many earlier commenters have touched on this absurdity. And what situation would not have occurred? The kill wouldn't be at large? So, their were no unsolved homicides before these phone OSes?
Fucking tools.
Its not a conspiracy as you allude to, its just ambulance chasing. Being an avid shooter, I'm well versed in the authoritarians "never letting a tragedy go to waste."
J Edgar Hoover and COINTELPRO
are all the justification any American needs for why the 4th amendment should be protected and why the government shouldn't have any access to your private information that isn't authorized by a legitimate warrant. It amazes me given that most of the leaders in our government are old enough to remember Hoover AND YET they still try to assert that they need unfettered access to our private data to protect us... today it is from terrorism, yesterday it was from communism.
The truth today as in the past remains that it isn't the ISMs we need protection from, it's the "protectors".
Seriously though, fine the phone is encrypted, locked, finito, can't get to the data in the phone. What about having a warrant for call records? You want the texts and call records, you don't need the phone. From there you got your list of people to continue the investigation. Are you seriously telling me looking at a person's Tetris score on their phone is critical somehow? Can we get some real law enforcement officers on the case?
Here's the million dollar question, whats stopping the killer from writing down a confession on paper, just working out the math by hand? It's pretty much sounding like, "Sorry citizen, you can't math."
Its not a conspiracy as you allude to, its just ambulance chasing. Being an avid shooter, I'm well versed in the authoritarians "never letting a tragedy go to waste."
So, explain the USAPATRIOTACT all-trussed-up and ready-to-go.
Explain all the mysterious, 600 BILLION-TO-ONE-odds Stock "Puts" on the SAME AIRLINES that were involved. When was THAT ever investigated? Talk about "Follow the Money"...
Of course I could go on and on. Like how do two buildings, struck at ENTIRELY different places, with ENTIRELY different (and wildly assymetric!!!) damage-profiles, go down in pretty-much PRECISELY the same manner, in pretty-much their own footprint (as much as possible with a 110-story building)?
Yes. Sometimes it really IS a Conspiracy.
The donut munching fat asses aren't going to get their suspect to them wrapped up as a nice neat gift on a silver platter and are actually going to fucking have to do their job?! WTF is the world coming to?!
Obviously this tragedy came about from the titanic struggle between the Samsung Edge 6 and the iPhone 6 battle for supremacy, humans are just pawns now.
Seriously though, just hack them if it is so important. I don't have either, but every smartphone I have ever had or seen only has a 4 digit pass code. A modern supercomputer should be able to brute force that crap faster than I can type about doing so.
Because about half of all homicides go unsolved.
Law enforcement wastes massive amounts of money on their own internal graft and corruption, and in the USA they waste massive amounts of money and resources prosecuting poor people disproportionately, because in the USA the value of the poor is measured by law enforcement and public policy by how much money can be secured by imprisoning the poor.
Anything to distract from the sheer incompetency and ineffectiveness of law enforcement, and to sustain the illusion that cops really give a shit about you.
Keep giving law enforcement a back door, and you better get used to bending over.
There might be no evidence on the phones to assist law enforcement. It is functionality of a flight recorder which is asked for by our governments. The devices need to record everything we said during the last 24 hours. Add to this GPS information. Big brother loves all of you.
So the killer(s) did some poor chap in, and then dropped their phones and fled? Seems a little absurd. Sounds like it was made up just to complain about FDE.
Maybe they had dropped their gloves too, and if only the glove company would tell them who bought them?
You are ignoring Parallel Construction , where spying is used to collect inadmissible evidence, and then 'sanitize' it:
link
Also:
link
It happens, and I wonder how much more happens that isn't reported. "National Security Letters" ring any bells?
Full encryption does not mean some one is already doing bad things.
Valid non-illegal uses for encryption:
1. What if the full disk encryption is to protect communication from a wife to a spouse. There is nothing wrong. Even for the religious, it is husband and wife, so not a sin.
One could argue that they shouldn't create a video at all. But maybe the video is made by the wife of someone in the armed forces. She sent her spouse a 10 minute video so he would have something while gone for over a year. She does all kinds of funky on the video. Nobody has the right to see that but her husband.
They aren't doing anything wrong. But yes, they need encryption.
2. Starting a technology critical business. You have the specs to create a new product that will be a billion dollar product. If corporate espionage occurred. Apple/Google/Microsoft releases the product, not you. Encryption is very important.
3. You use your phone to store all you business finance, bank statements, and tax documents. Your business doesn't need a computer. So you keep it all on your phone encrypted.
There are many more reasons for encryption. It should NOT have a back door. If it does, the encryption is inadequate and should be replaced.
Ya betta give us what we want or we might not be able ta guarantee da safety of ya daughters, if yiz catch my drift.
"An American citizen issued a warrant ordering NSA, FBI and CIA to unlock the mass surveillance programs and share with taxpayers any data therein that could potentially solve the decades of illegal activities on the part of the federal government. NSA, FBI and CIA replied, in essence, that they could not — because they operate above the law and exist in part to control the American population and prevent it from being able to pose a threat to the federal government. The laws remain disregarded. The government remains in place."
Opaque envelopes do it, too. And curtains on windows.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Why not pull the SIM card and use that to find their phone records?
I don't understand why a 4 pin passcode is blocking the feds from cracking the encryption. I mean, if they had an intern sit with the phone and go through all 10000 combinations, it would probably work.
If md5 is venerable to being cracked, how is this any different?
Ben