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

What about the rest?

[Kohath]

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.

So 80% of the phones they want to decrypt aren't related to crimes serious enough to mention.

Re:What about the rest?

[Kohath]

Following the links we get the real percentages:
- sex crimes: 9%
- homocide: 10%
- assault/robbery/burglary: 14%

Those are the violent crimes. Then
- non-violent property crimes: 36%

And finally police busybodying and misc:
- drug prohibition: 24%
- weapons charge: 5%
- other: 2%

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?

[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.

Re:What about the rest?

[Applehu Akbar]

When a prosecutor cites child porn as a rationale for grabbing our Constitutional rights, you can bet that the real reason is to save a bunch of those ever-lucrative nonviolent drug cases.

Re:What about the rest?

[sudon't]

Yeah, and what kind of "sex crimes" are we even talking about? We already see kids getting arrested as "child pornographers" for sexting their BF or GF, and other such nonsense. Police seem to spend far more time and resources on policing consensual interactions than on actual crime. We need to get the government out of the personal morality business altogether.

What you know...

[PsychoSlashDot]

To a large degree, data storage is an extension of what a person knows. Why bother memorizing a phone number when you have hardware to do it? Why bother memorizing a hundred passwords when you have hardware to do it? Even our music collection is on hardware purely because our ability to memorize it is imperfect.

The moment a law is passed that mandates law-enforcement access to our electronic devices, we are giving them access to what we know. Today that may or may not be reasonable. But tomorrow, the day after, or a hundred years from now we will have these devices integral to ourselves. Implants within us, most likely, that augment our memories. It's not unreasonable to predict a (likely distant) future where a device taps our optic nerve and provides us "augmented reality". Can't remember the name of the person you're looking at? The device will do that for you. But it will also be able to record what you see, or hear, for future perfect recall.

So what happens when the iPhone law is applied to internal storage? It's mind-reading. This legislation is one step shy of "police must be allowed to read your mind if it is possible". That disturbs me.

NY DA and the rest can GET FUCKED

[Rick Schumann]

All you LEOs, all you DAs, all you politicians, all the way up to POTUS? You can go fuck yourselves. We don't want to live in a world where only the rich, powerful, and the government are the only ones entitled to keep their data safe. We don't give a flying fuck about your obsessive-compulsive need to see everything, know everything, and control everything; go take your meds, go call your therapist, go take a time-out somewhere cool dark and quiet, but get the hell out of our phones, out of our computers, out of our lives! You are not making us 'safe', all you're doing is feeding your own hunger for power, and we're sick and tired of it. STOP!!!