New York's District Attorney: Roll Back Apple's iPhone Encryption (mashable.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Mashable: Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said Thursday that he wants Apple's encryption to go back to how it was in early 2014. Back then, police could basically extract any information they wanted after getting a warrant. "Doing nothing about this problem will perpetuate an untenable arms race between private industry and law enforcement," Vance said on Thursday. "Federal legislation is our only chance to lay these arms aside."

Vance said he's got 423 "lawfully-seized Apple devices" that his employees can't do anything with. Forty-two of those devices "pertain to homicide or attempted murder cases" according to the district attorney's office, and a similar number "relate to sex crimes." The argument, of course, is that the district attorney's office would have an easier time solving crimes if they had access to these phones... Apple believes being forced to hack into phones at the government's will is an unreasonable burden.
ZDNet adds that "the call for federal legislation could be given a popular boost by president elect Donald Trump, who previously called for a boycott on Apple products when it refused to help the FBI."

Comments

Note to 5-0

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

I don't trust Apple no more than I trust government agencies, because despite their pro-privacy posturing, they really work for the man - just like Google and all the others. Therefore, when I want to commit a crime and store files about it on my cellphone, PC or transmit said files to my fellow criminals, I encrypt them *before* saving them. Savvy criminals do the same.

I'm a smart criminal, so you ain't gonna find no clear-text file on none of my computer devices, regardless of the brand.

Re:Fat chance o'dat

[amiga3D]

I could compromise on this. No more secret courts with secret warrants. No more searching phones without a warrant. Go back to obeying the Constitution (as it's written not as you interpret) and I can see making the phones with two keys. One for the user and one for the courts. But to open the phones so that the government can ignore the 4th amendment is wrong.

Re:What about the rest?

[NatasRevol]

100% of the searches violating the 4th amendment.

Re:What about the rest?

[No Longer an AC]

http://www.npr.org/2015/03/30/...

If you're murdered in America, there's a 1 in 3 chance that the police won't identify your killer.

To use the FBI's terminology, the national "clearance rate" for homicide today is 64.1 percent. Fifty years ago, it was more than 90 percent.

And that's worse than it sounds, because "clearance" doesn't equal conviction: It's just the term that police use to describe cases that end with an arrest, or in which a culprit is otherwise identified without the possibility of arrest — if the suspect has died, for example.

That's just murder, but it was easy to find.

Then I found this:

http://www.governing.com/topic...

Data recorded in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program show just how widely clearance rates vary across larger police departments. Of the 100 cities reporting the most murders in 2013, 11 cleared less than a quarter of their cases. Meanwhile, eight departments registered clearance rates of 90 percent or more. The national murder clearance rate was 64 percent for 2013.

It probably varies widely by crime as well.

Re:What about the rest?

[matbury]

The FBI can effectively investigate the telecommunications of networks/groups involved in law breaking just by looking at the metadata, which can't be encrypted. From metadata, we can see where anybody (everybody) is and when, and who they're with, often in real time, as long as they have their phones with them and turned on. In addition, the FBI can install spyware on suspects' phones, effectively turning their phones into ambient audio and video, and phone call, message, and SMS surveillance devices, as well as overriding the shutdown functions of the phones so that they appear to be turned off but the spyware is still active. Basically, full-spectrum surveillance.

Now, if the FBI can't catch law breakers with those tools at their disposal, what use are they?

Re:What about the rest?

[Vegan Cyclist]

Yeah, but how accurate were they in actually incarcerating the correct person? How many were mistakes? It could very well always have been closer to 60%, but with wrongly accused people put in jail (which we now know occurs with great frequency) who had much less means to defend themselves in the past. Even today's numbers (64%) are likely inflated with wrongful convictions. Fact is: solving murders is often hard work. (And how qualified are many of the people doing it? Often 'a conviction' is much more important for optics than 'a correct conviction', due to other perverse systems and influences in play.) Lots more to this.

stupid DA, encryption is for everybody

[swschrad]

if it isn't flatfoots exceeding their warrant authority, it's thieves and hackers. out in user land, we can't tell the difference. so encryption is getting better, and the world is better off for it.