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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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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."
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.
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.
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.
Lol passcode ? thats it?... just try them all geeeeeeez...............
Yes, unless he has used an usually long and mixed one, it should only take a few hours, otherwise you might have to wait a week or so, but still no time at all in the scale of criminal investigations.
I believe the owner might be dead.
"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.
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.
And the content of the phones is guaranteed to prove who-dun-it?
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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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.
If I wanted my passcode to be known to police in the event of my murder, I could pre-share it with a trusted friend or family member (or a few). That requires no backdoor.
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.
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.
They do. It's called a National Security Letter. It is literally a pass-key into any home. No steenking warrant required.
They do have one, and they generally use it fairly reaonsably. There are exceptions, and those make the news.
Yeah, when the target is lucky enough to even find out that a warrantless search was conducted.
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."
Just for the sake of anyone who hasn't thought this through: The device's hard drive may be encrypted, that that doesn't mean you have to use the screen to enter all the possibilities or have to wait or have to worry about getting locked out.
When decrypting the hard drive (card/whatever) of a device, you pull the media out, copy it and then access it in an environment you control. So you can try a billion guesses a second if your computing resources can handle it. A phone's storage capacity is small enough that you could actually distribute a couple hundred thousand copies to a couple high end clusters and have them all trying their unique possible combinations in parallel.
Having lock-out features and delays only stops the casual criminal. The well financed criminal or government can hit your encrypted data with an unimaginable number of guesses per second. If you think your password is good enough to keep out the government or drug lord, I recommend you bear in mind that they are going to guess every possible eight digit password in under three seconds.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
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.
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!”
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.
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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.
Yes, and we should jail all glove manufacturers. They are guilty of hiding fingerprints of criminals and terrorists. They should be able to provide fingerprints, after all, criminals keep hands hands in gloves made by them!
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.
Speaking in practical terms, the point is not actually to make it completely impossible for anyone to access data they "shouldn't". The point is to raise the cost of access - in effort - beyond the point where it's economically viable to go after any but the biggest targets. In short: So a dedicated group could compromise you with a computing cluster... So what?
If you don't find that reasoning palatable, consider this:
Try and think of an estimate, in dollars for services rendered, to do the following:
1. Have someone steal your phone
2. Disassemble the phone and read the contents of the flash RAM and the secure enclave out (in the latter case by dropping it into an acid bath and manually reading the status of the bits out of the traces - yes it can be done) (remember, the password only permutes another, much longer key in the enclave)
3. Pass this info to a good-sized computing cluster
4. Dig actionable intel out with some good forensic software
Now compare that dollar cost to what you might pay some local thug to:
1. Hit you with a brick until you give out the password, or in the case of touch-ID, wrestle your finger onto your own device.
If the cost of scenario A is higher than the cost of scenario B, then problem = "solved".
Unfortunately for you, even if you come up with some epic convoluted method to render BOTH scenarios totally unfruitful, as long as scenario B works _some_ of the time they will try it _anyway_. And you will probably end up dead.
Well, there's two things. The first is the ones that hide your password behind a small hash, and hope that you don't have the tech to get into that, by guarding access. Like if you spam PINs into an iphone, it won't let you. The attacker workaround there is a physical hack of the system to let you spam those tries- then you're in instantly, because there's not many combinations.
The second one is data at rest. If all you use is lowercase and numbers, but you have it not something that is a word or otherwise in a hash table, an 8 character password is a bit short, but it is still over 2 trillion possibilities. That's not safe from a state level attacker, but I don't know where you get your "seconds" estimate.
Throw in some special characters or capitals and that goes way up though. However, it's probably easier just to remember a longer password. From above:
The Tenth Wagging Puppy Dog Is the Cutest Swimming In the Twelve Foot Bog
t10wpDiscsit12fB
That's like 8 trillion trillion or something. Ain't nobody checking that in 3 seconds.
Yup.
Nobody's hitting me with a brick to get my password. If you can credibly threaten to, you can have it. Nothing on my phone is worth a bloody nose, let alone a broken bone or my life.
With that in mind, I would NEVER put anything on my phone that would incriminate me of a felony or give a potential blackmailer the ability to ruin my life. In fact, I stay away from scenarios where such things even could exist for the same reasons.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Get a Ouija board?
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.
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!
I believe Americans are overly obsessed with so-called privacy.
by Anonymous Coward
Speaks for itself, doesn't it?
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Says the guy posting anonymously. If you really believed you had nothing to hide you would sign your real name to this post at a minimum. If you have nothing to hide why not post your home address as well. I mean you have nothing to hide right?
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.
Opaque envelopes do it, too. And curtains on windows.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
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