Slashdot Mirror
FBI Couldn't Access Nearly 7,000 Devices Because of Encryption (foxbusiness.com)
Michael Balsamo, writing for Associated Press: The FBI hasn't been able to retrieve data from more than half of the mobile devices it tried to access in less than a year, FBI Director Christopher Wray said Sunday, turning up the heat on a debate between technology companies and law enforcement officials trying to recover encrypted communications. In the first 11 months of the fiscal year, federal agents were unable to access the content of more than 6,900 mobile devices, Wray said in a speech at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Philadelphia. "To put it mildly, this is a huge, huge problem," Wray said. "It impacts investigations across the board -- narcotics, human trafficking, counterterrorism, counterintelligence, gangs, organized crime, child exploitation." The FBI and other law enforcement officials have long complained about being unable to unlock and recover evidence from cellphones and other devices seized from suspects even if they have a warrant, while technology companies have insisted they must protect customers' digital privacy.
apples new face unlock will make it easy!
Or, they're saying that they can't access these devices to lull criminals into a false sense of complacency.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
They need to gather evidence in other ways. It's unlikely that drugghuman trafficking is all done via mobiles.
Encryption works as designed.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
FBI confirmed for whiny crybabies who want to be spoonfed everything instead of doing the jobs they were hired to do.
Let's face the facts. There can only be two choices when it comes to encryption: Ban ALL encryption for consumer devices (which would be a gigantic leap backwards and create a massive security issue for everyone) or leave encryption alone. Compromising encryption algorithms IS A NON-STARTER.
Of course if they banned encrytion, then of course the rich, and politicians would still manage to have it, as would EVERY SINGLE CRIMINAL AND TERRORIST with the means and wherewithal to find and use it, so banning encryption is also a NON-STARTER. The Djinn is already out of the bottle, we do not have time travel machines, you can't go back in time and prevent encryption from being invented, fucking DEAL WITH IT, LAW ENFORCEMENT!
On how many of those devices did they have a warrant to even try to access them?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Have they become too lazy to do investigations by tried and true (Columbo, Kojac) methods? I guess they can't afford cable TV.
The FBI can't beat confessions out of thousands and thousands of suspects, making it harder to get convictions from criminals hiding critical evidence in their encrypted (non-cleartext) brains.
Sorry, but some sacrifices are needed to keep democracies from becoming police states. Especially when it is always the police asking for more an more power over citizens they are supposed to protect.
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Does anyone have a list of devices the FBI can't decrypt? I'd like to make sure my next phone is one on the list, but I'm not sure which Android devices pass that test.
We have a president
Cry somewhere else, TFA is about the FBI.
Basically they got greedy. They wanted dragnet-like capabilities, and they were like "well fuck these civilians". They went too far, and now found out about that Dutch saying that says: "trust arrives walking, and departs on horseback".
And now nobody trusts these three letter agencies anymore. And now they're whining like toddlers, saying "this is a huge, huge problem" when in fact they created the problem themselves.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Think of the children!
Meanwhile Jeff Epstein's island continues to operate.
The FBI has lost all credibility.
I wonder how the FBI scored prosecutions before mobile devices were invented? I guess they must not have solved any crimes at all?
The problem is that there is not a way that would allow for the encryption to actually protect the user's data at the same time as give law enforcement access. Take, for example, the physical master key. A landlord might have a single key that opens every lock for the complex in which he or she administers. The individuals living may feel protected since their keys only open each of their doors. A thief would only need wait until the land lord was complacent to steal the master key and then have access to entire complex. The same problem works in the virtual world with encryption. Even if there is not a malicious 3rd party involved, who watches the watchers? Let us say, in a near perfect world, that 99% of law enforcement is honest, there would still be that 1% that is dishonest. Even in the case of 100% being honest, many can name to where the road of good intentions will lead us; good actors having limited scope do no necessarily have good results.
I understand the need for law enforcement, but I also understand the need for personal privacy and sanctity of one's personal property (home, things, so on).
I understand if I drop a cigarette or cigar butt or even a soda cap that it might have my DNA or fingerprints on it. I know that my cell phone might radiate identifying information about me.
My point is this:
The line between what the government can legally pry into and what requires a search warrant has always been and will forever be "blurry" in the USA.
I would rather the laws err on being more cautious and protective of people's rights rather than making everyone's life an open book for law enforcement.
Ok. Some /. snark is going to come along and say, "Think about the children?" or the "Think about those slave of human-trafficing".
Yeah, I get that and all, but would you rather be considered "guilty before being proven innocent"? Seriously think about that. Thrown into jail without a phone call or chance to contact anyone outside to fight on your behalf. In some countries that is called "disappearing people" and those people are never seen or heard from again. Do you really want that fate hanging over your head for the slightest infraction? It can't get that serious you say? Think again, history has proven to all of us that human beings can be exceptionally cruel and uncaring towards other human beings.
So you snark and say on /. "Well I am not a human being." Ok. In that case you would not mind if someone squeezed off a few clips at you and killed you? It would probably be legal to do so if you can claim and prove you are not a human being.
All I want anyone in the USA to really really carefully consider is this:
Be very very careful of the rights that you give up to your government because you might not get them back for a long long time, if ever. And then if you do get any rights back, it may only happen after major revolutions within the country that tear it apart and leave it on "the slag heap of history".
And then where are you and your rights??
How any crimes were ever solved before smart phones. It's a mystery.
The agents who struggled to prosecute teenagers for ripping off the telco 20 and 30 years ago are now considered some of the senior "cyber" experts. Somewhere at the FBI there is a crotchty old fucker who still tries to use his checkbook at the grocery store and he's sending out weekly paper memos urging his underlings to finally figure out what to do about these encripdon scramblers. "We defeated screen saver passwords we can defeat this too!"
It's going to take a die-off to un-fuck this situation.
In the meantime this idiot's crying and attention whory attempts at public lobbying by proxy is alerting even relatively unsophisticated criminals that somehow this encryption stuff is pretty hard for law enforcement to crack.
To put it mildly, this is a huge, huge problem,"
Hey, FBI?
No, it isn't, but do you remember this? The absolutely massive violations of the 4th amendment by the USGov? THAT is a "huge, huge problem". The intrusion into the personal life of billions of ordinary, peaceful, law abiding citizens around the world (not just in the USofA). No-warrant, mass surveillance, like we used to blame the USSR and GDR for.
You violated the spirit and the letter of the law on such a scale that the world pushed back. You were given our trust, and you violated it. Not just here and there, exceptionally. No, you violated it systemically and constantly, for decades. And you are still doing so. No one who violated those laws has seen their day in court, a single day in prison, a single dollar of fine. You turned yourselves into a surveillance state.
So yes, we are pushing back and we will KEEP pushing back, harder than ever. We will reclaim the rights you stole from us, with or without your permission. Because that's how things work in a free society - something you wouldn't understand.
Sincerely,
The rest of us who aren't tyrannical fucks.
So, 20 years ago when smart phones didnâ(TM)t exist, was it a huge problem then? Because, if not, it canâ(TM)t be a huge problem now.
Do you have ESP?
We have a president who is a full blown lunatic and she has a staff filled with criminals.
Hillary lost the election.
*points finger* Ha ha!
Oh, darn, I disabled FaceUnlock for my iPhone. How could that have happened?
Easy solution: stop spying on Americans.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You are seriously going to try this? So, everything before Trump was perfect, and as soon as he is out of office, it will be perfect again?
>> Maybe we should limit the powers of our government . . .
Yes. We should. No buts. No "until such a time." If you think you can trust any administration, good for you. Stupid. But good for you.
They are not going to be able to grab someone's device and lock up the case on them...sorry. Just not a problem that someone can solve for them. They are going to have to do real police work to bust people.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
My heart bleeds for them.
"Law enforcement is essentially in servitude to Trump and his criminal staff."
So, explain to us why Clinton and Obama aren't in jail.
If encryption was lessened to where law enforcement can get in I wonder how many phones, including those of law enforcement agencies, will be compromised by those with malicious intent who figured out how to get in, either by hacks / mods / social engineering? Sounds like that would be a big problem as well. I hope they are as willing to pursue all of the cases where phones were decrypted by non-law enforcement and information is stolen from phone users. oops I hope I don't believe that.
We have a president who is a full blown lunatic and he has a staff filled with criminals
You mean, warrantless wiretapping and searches haven't exploded during the previous full blown lunatic, and haven't been started by the full blown lunatic before him?
For those who lost count, those lunatics belonged to the opposite parties, and so did their staffs of criminals.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
This --> &
is the world's smallest violin. And it's playing just for you.
Have gnu, will travel.
federal agents were unable to access the content of more than 6,900 mobile devices, Wray said in a speech at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Philadelphia. "To put it mildly, this is a huge, huge problem,"
And to the extent that we care about the Constitution, we want to keep it that way. Don't forget, these police associations are the primary lobbyists for that police right to steal from citizens.
I wonder what it is like when the director of the NSA and the FBI get together. Does the director of the FBI just lay into the director of the NSA for creating this "problem" or does he just give him the evil eye.
If the FBI succeeds in making the device manufacturers provide back doors to encryption, it will take exactly 0 seconds for 3rd party apps that encrypt securely to take its place.
So just do whatever it is you did before smartphones.
Boo fucking hoo.
I see a day when encryption will be outlawed the way machine guns are outlawed. So I want an function on my phone so the screen lock has two codes. One to unlock the phone for normal use. The other to brick the phone so nothing exists on it after the code is entered.
There's a handful of law enforcement people who want backdoors. Everyone else says no. You need a few more participants on the other side before it qualifies as a 'debate'.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
There are many other messages that remain inaccessible historically.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Can someone please tell me what could possibly be on these phones that they can't get to? They already have all the calls & likely texts from the carrier (with a warrant, right?). They think there are some pictures of a terrorist holding his AK or something? I just really don't understand the need.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
I'll try:
Maybe because they haven't committed any crimes or maybe because they haven't been convicted of any crimes or maybe because this is still a country that doesn't imprison those that are no longer in power.
I just don't understand. They continue to say things like this, appearing to be in complete denial of reality. Why is this? Encryption is out there. It's not going away, and there is no going back to the way they used to operate. They need to accept this. I believe 100% that companies who have the ability to provide/decrypt customer data with a court order should be required to do so. This should increase safety for all of us, as software continues to be written that ensures it is in fact impossible for those companies to access our data, as it should be. In many cases, this means criminals are going to get away with crimes. It's unfortunate, but this is the price we pa for privacy. The tools are available to everyone. There is simply no excuse for this level of ignorance in the law enforcement community, let alone among politicians.
Every time I hear about law enforcement wanting anything to do with mobile phones it reminds me how much they put into recovering stolen devices in the first place.... exactly zero.
Priorities right?
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
If the law enforcement community had a better reputation, encryption wouldn't be such an issue.
police beatings, shootings, CIA/NSA spying on everyone, constant fear...
living in a police state with a police force and government with little regard to the values this country was founded on.
And with crypto currency wallets to protect. it is getting to be important to everyone.
steal your freedom, money and possibly hurt/kill you.
why would anyone want to share anything with big brother.
double plus not good.
These people are *REMEMBERING* details of their criminal activity but we can't read their minds! Now that we have a machine that can interpret what people are thinking- you are pro crime unless you allow us to read everyone's minds.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Its an absolute BUMMER that law interferes with law enforcement.
Ok, but how many devices did they un-lock in the first 11-months? what's the total devices that they had? Were is the rest of the information need for this article. Poor reporting
When the govenrment is working for the people to strengthen the products they use, the people are more willing to go along with its recommendations. And to trust it when it says it needs a backdoor and will only use it with a warrant in cases of criminal or national security importance.
But the last two decades has seen multiple revelations that the government is working against the people - violating the 4th Amendment under the veil of secrecy. When the public gets a whiff of that, they start to distrust the government. Not only do they refuse to put in backdoors, they start implementing security measures that even they cannot bypass if they lose the key. "Just to be on the safe side."
The U.S. government has nobody to blame but themselves for letting things to get to this point. Once you lose the people's trust, the people stop going out of their way to make things easier for the government, and in fact will start doing things to make things harder for the government.
Incidentally, that was a PR snowjob by Apple. The cell phone in that case didn't belong to the terrorists. It actually belonged to the San Bernardino County government. It was assigned to one of the terrorists as a work phone. Apple was basically arguing that they should not be compelled to give the owner of a phone access to information on the phone in the case of a (potential) dire emergency. If you follow through on their argument, employers would not have access to company phones they provided to employees, parents would not have access to phones they bought for their kids, you could not authorize police to pull GPS data from a phone you lent to a friend when they went hiking and got lost. It's an argument which weakens the concept of ownership (right of the owner to know what their property is being used for, vs the user's right to privacy).
And how many of these devices (statistically speaking) actually would contain meaningful evidence for the crime the person is accused of (if they even have been)? I would bet that the percentage could be counted on a single hand and of even those few cases I would wager that only a handful would be for serious (IE theft, murder, assault) crimes. Law enforcement these days cast a disturbingly wide net. There is a case where a person crossing the Mexican border a couple years ago accidentally forgot about 5 handgun bullets in their glovebox and their vehicle was impounded because it was "being used to transport munitions". Last I heard he still hadn't gotten his truck back, had never been charged with a crime, and was basically being denied the chance to challenge the seizure in court.
That means they successfully hacked millions upon millions.
manipulating the quote does not really help you make your point
You are more of a threat to a free, democratic society than terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers and their ilk have ever been.
Here is a cock. Suck it.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
The reality is that the 3-letter agencies want their people to be able to sit at a keyboard in a cubicle in an air-conditioned office, type in a query, and find criminals that way.
Remember when investigations involved something called "pounding the pavement"? Go *out there* to catch actual criminals, for fuck's sake! No technology has been invented that prevents them from doing that again.
""To put it mildly, this is a huge, huge problem," Wray said. "It impacts investigations across the board -- narcotics, human trafficking, counterterrorism, counterintelligence, gangs, organized crime, child exploitation, political coverups, wait, did I say that last part out loud?"
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Face ID can't be tricked by showing it an image, not even a 3D image, because it doesn't work using optical imaging.
> Apple was basically arguing that they should not be compelled to give the owner of a phone access to information on the phone in the case of a (potential) dire emergency.
Apple had several arguments, the most powerful of which was that the government had not proven that Apple was the only party which had sufficient expertise to crack the phone--the law only gives the government authority to force a company to aid in this type of situation when there's no reasonable alternative.
But if it makes you feel better about yourself to concoct some sort of anti-Apple fiction, then please do. Maybe you won't need to kick a puppy on the way home then.
Stuff's hard sometimes and I don't like it. Please fix.
"It impacts investigations across the board -- lunch plans, personal fetishes, the great deal they got on that Nintendo off of Craigslist, mundane "I love you"s from countless people" -- who have a reasonable expectation of privacy regardless of which technology (a smart phone or a piece of paper) they happen to be using right now. Suck it up and do some real detective work for a change and stop pretending that there's only one place were any evidence could be. You don't get to intrude on our lives just because it's the easiest avenue to snoop around in.
Give them this and in 10 years they'll be whining about how unfair it is that they need a warrant to read your mind.
You laugh, but this has been tried.
In the case cited, fMRI scans were used to determine whether the plaintiff's "intent". IOW, they were using the scans to determine whether the doctor has "intent" to defraud the insurance agencies.
Why should this be easy?
Cellebrite isn't infallible.
This is a good thing! I am against government incursion into private affairs. The fact that the FBI is whining like a child whom nobody will share their toys with is a win for freedom!
Just go wii wii wii all the way home.
No. The huge huge problem is the FBI trying to get data from over 14,000 phones a year.
Explain to me why Bush and Cheney aren't in jail? They're outright war criminals by both the letter and intent of the Geneva Conventions.
And the result is, the FBI couldn't access half the smartphones they wanted to last year.
Nor could they access any of the guns they failed to find last year. Or read any of the documents shredded and burned. Or transcribe any of the phone calls they failed to tap and/or record. Or, for that matter, understand any of the dead languages they could not translate, or drink any of the coffees they failed to pour.
Apparently they need to seek out evidence, via, you know, police work. I feel so sorry for them, being forced to do the jobs they were trained to do. None of that justifies backdoors into secure devices.
It always amazes me. Those on the left trust these government critters to run our lives. At the same time they refuse to trust those same critters in cases like this. This is why the constitution was set up to limit what the government can do. The primary purpose of the constitution is to protect us from government abuse.
They tried to access 14,000 phones, but probably only had warrants for 5 of them.
I've not seen any reporting as to the percentage of phones they have been able to access that actually yielded evidentiary information relevant to the specific investigation that led to the initial inquiry. Is there any proof, either way, as to the usefulness of such access? Or, more likely, is such access merely desired for "fishing" expeditions?
...what the FBI want us to think.
From the agency that utilizes parallel construction. Any law abiding citizen should rightfully wish to encrypt as much as their data as possible to give themselves at least some small measure of protection from these agencies, who demonstrate utter contempt for both the spirit and the letter of the very law they are tasked to enforce.
Next up, steel reinforced front doors should be outlawed, because it interferes with early-am no-knock armed raids on people suspected of jay walking.
That's because the FBI doesn't have the cool kids toys like the NSA/CIA which has all the backdoors into these devices.
"Encryption" bwhahahahahaha... doesn't mean anything if the device is running an insecure OS or BIOS
The FBI, nor any other snooper, should not be able to bust the encryption of my devices. That I bought in good faith that the vendor tried to make them secure.
Billions of everyday people use encryption to protect themselves from criminals and spies.
Dangerous criminals also sometimes use encryption to protect their data.
Extremely dangerous criminals with fancy titles complain about the second group when really they are upset that they cannot spy on the first group.
Government: like the mafia, but with more guns.
The wonderful wizard of Jobs!
Encryption existed long before the US Constitution or the Fourth Amendment were written. By today's standards, that encryption was pathetic. But back then, it was a significant obstacle to law enforcement. The founders knew this when they wrote the Fourth Amendment so did the states when they ratified it.
The founders included the Fourth Amendment because they had already witnessed the abuses of surveillance by the British government. They were trying to limit similar abuses by the government they were forming.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
They never got Appleâ(TM)s help. Kinda blows your little theory up, doesnâ(TM)t it?
An iPhone is a digital safe. Safe companies are well within their rights to make a safe without backdoorsâ"and thatâ(TM)s what Apple is trying to do.
Occasionally the government has a good reason to crack a safe, but the law is such that the safe company only has to help if thereâ(TM)s no other reasonable option.
Thatâ(TM)s why Apple won.
Decrypting the info on suspects' phones isn't necessary in most cases:
- Most organised criminals use simple burner phones that don't have encryption.
- The FBI has access to everyone's automatic backups on the "cloud."
- The FBI has access to phone metadata which tells them everything about the phones' locations, movements, times, who they called, etc. They use social network analysis software to construct elaborate and detailed maps of people's activities through from their phones' metadata. If anyone's dumb enough to use their phone during or for criminal activities, the FBI can easily identify and catch them.
It seems like there's an ulterior motive behind this constant pressure to ban or weaken encryption for citizens. Either that or the FBI are plain incompetent and want to blame/scapegoat something.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
"Michael Balsamo, writing for Associated Press:"
"Justin Heifetz, writing for Motherboard:"
Can't you see these articles are total garbage?
"... while technology companies have insisted they must protect customers' digital privacy."
That is not even close to what the actual problem of the whole situation is, and the fact that the "journalist" would _write_ that is mindboggling.
What the fuck is going on? Why are you reposting terrible, stupid articles from "journalists" like this? And how the hell can I opt out from it?
Like the PC SJW nonsense from BeauHD wasn't enough, along comes this bullshit.
This is NOT the Slashdot I know.
There are many obvious attacks to smatphone encryption, particularly as those devices aren't highly secure. (they cannot be as that would mean substancial changes to the case, and probably much larger devices, not to speak about the multi $1000 pricetag tamper prevention technology costs)
Any of those phones can be broken with a few $100k of budget.
Their encryption demands are there to make it scalable, so you can use it on random bag searches.
good.
Real criminals where there is a compelling public interest in stopping them (i.e., murders and terrorists and child abusers) simply wouldn't leave incriminating evidence on their devices. Yes I recognize that a few of the stupider ones might, but overall, they wouldn't.
So what this is really about is whether average Joe Schmoe can be investigated for copyright infringement whenever the cops can invent some excuse for checking his phone, like when he crosses the border going on vacation.
Encryption works, don't try and change that. The arrest and investigation must already have a basis, so just change the law and say, we assume there is evidence on said device which implicates you to X, Y & Z. For those that have nothing to hide, it has no effect. Those that do have a choice, go to jail basis on an assumption or reveal the data and get prosecuted accordingly.
Some 240 million people should give up encryption because of 6,900? The entire nations devices become more at risk because of 0.002875% of the population?
Not surprising to see the director planting these seeds of bullshit so early in his career. That must have been some rigorous lapdog training he went through.
Your sig here!
How did they solve crimes 10 years ago when people didn't have smart phones? What evidence was available then that isn't available now?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Get a f***ing warrant.
If only there was a responsible trustworthy agency which could handle this like NOTHING THE US GOVERNMENT TOUCHES!
The FBI has only themselves to blame for this. Fuck them.
Congress cannot pass a law protecting civil rights including the 4th amendment which they cannot break.
In face Face ID won't work unless your eyes are open and you are looking at the phone, so you have that option in your silly scenario.
But the real answer is that in both cases you press the lock button 5 times quickly while the phone is in your pocket and the phone will require a passcode to continue.
Actually the real answer is that noone cares that much about getting into your phone. Because you are irrelevant.
No more cell phones or digital devices of any kind for any American.
That or no more FBI
I like the latter better
No doubt in ages past, the invention of the opaque envelope was seen as a boon to criminals and terrorists and revolutionaries. "How can we protect our kingdom if letters and even large documents can pass from person to person, completely hidden from His Magesty's government's eyes?"
As for boxes and homes with locks? "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." Ban them!
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
You mean, warrantless wiretapping and searches haven't exploded during the previous full blown lunatic, and haven't been started by the full blown lunatic before him?
Don't be silly. Government breaking the law goes way, way back - nothing new was "started" by that particular lunatic. It often seems as though the primary jobs of government are to screw up and to break the law. They're really good at both of those things, because they get a lot of practice.
The study of US legal history is depressing. It seems as though the government is always willing to break the law, and the lawyers are always willing to be unethical. Thank you, US judges, for letting this happen.
So, do you still stand by your zero chance statement?