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New York DA Wants Apple, Google To Roll Back Encryption (tomsguide.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. called on Apple and Google to weaken their device encryption, arguing that thousands of crimes remained unsolved because no one can crack into the perpetrators' phones. Vance, speaking at the International Conference on Cyber Security here, said that law enforcement officials did not need an encryption "backdoor," sidestepping a concern of computer-security experts and device makers alike. Instead, Vance said, he only wanted the encryption standards rolled back to the point where the companies themselves can decrypt devices, but police cannot. This situation existed until September 2014, when Apple pushed out iOS 8, which Apple itself cannot decrypt. "Tim Cook was absolutely right when he told his shareholders that the iPhone changed the world," Vance said. "It's changed my world. It's letting criminals conduct their business with the knowledge we can't listen to them."
You shouldn't be able to listen to them... you shouldn't be able to listen to anyone. Try doing your job the old fashioned way... outsmart them.. stop trying to take short cuts at the expensive our our rights and liberties...
But hey.. that's just my opinion
--Hired Net Grunt
Many law enforcement leaders are acting as if no crimes can be solved unless all cell phones are made more vulnerable.
What a great idea.... weaken everyone for a few rare cases.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
So what you can't listen to them? Have these guys never heard of police work? Here's a hint, it's not synonymous with spying. If you can't follow the money, them the crime is probably too petty to worry about.
Glad to hear he thinks we don't need privacy.
Now I have a long list of police files and videos I would like to see.
Wait, you mean you don't want us to see those? But thousands of accusations against police are going unsolved without access to them!
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
One problem time and again is that crypto only works for "the good guys" (which may or may not include LEOs, this is not automatic) if it isn't diddled, and therefore it also works for "the bad guys", whoever those might be. This is well-known in "intelligence"-land, but the concepts that are well-known and -understood there, quite certainly aren't in, oh, LEO land. Or the land of the liars, er, politicians. Or much anywhere else, really. Something that will have to change, thanks to information technology and world-wide networks.
Another problem is that the LEOs are now the tail wagging the dog. Maybe they should re-read the Peelian principles, instead of fancying themselves the militarised "command and control" hub of society.
Otherwise you have a full-blown Police State and that is far, far worse than almost any amount of unsolved crime. In a free state, the police must be severely limited in what it can do and must be kept at a level of power that allows them to reliably keep society functioning, but never above.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The DA provides the best argument for Apple to strengthen encryption, by his own existence and statement. Imagine 10,000 district attorneys across the US, each of which have varying competence / incompetence in handling investigations, requests from Apple certain encryption/decryption keys, and wildly varying levels of knowledge about how to use or judge when to ask for this capability.
And, for that matter, wildly differing capabilities to securely handle and keep private the information they find on people's phones.
No thank you, and Apple is right to refuse them.