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.

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on a separate note

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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.

Well, you got greedy

[cerberusss]

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.