(Newswire.net — September 27, 2014) — Police have said that the ability to search photos, messages and Web histories on smartphones is essential to solving a range of serious crimes, including murder, child pornography and attempted terrorist attacks.
“There will come a day when it will matter a great deal to the lives of people . . . that we will be able to gain access” to such devices, Comey told reporters in a briefing.
“I want to have that conversation [with companies responsible] before that day comes.” said Comey.
The irony, some say, is that while the legal and technical changes are fueled by anger over reports of mass surveillance by the National Security Agency, the consequences are being felt most heavily by police detectives, often armed with warrants certifying that a judge has found probable cause that a search of a smartphone will reveal evidence of a crime.
“The outrage is directed at warrantless mass surveillance, and this is a very different context. It’s searching a device with a warrant,” said Orin Kerr, a former Justice Department computer crimes lawyer who is now a professor at George Washington University.
Yet the devices themselves are gradually moving beyond the reach of police in a range of circumstances, prompting ire from investigators. Frustration is running particularly high at Apple, which made the first announcement about new encryption and is moving much more swiftly than Google to get it into the hands of consumers.
“Apple will become the phone of choice for the pedophile,” said John J. Escalante, chief of detectives for Chicago’s police department. “The average pedophile at this point is probably thinking, I’ve got to get an Apple phone.”
The new encryption initiatives by Apple and Google come after June’s Supreme Court ruling requiring police, in most circumstances, to get a search warrant before gathering data from a cellphone. The magistrate courts that typically issue search warrants, meanwhile, are more carefully scrutinizing requests amid the heightened privacy concerns that followed the NSA disclosures that began last year.
Civil liberties activists call this shift a necessary correction to the deterioration of personal privacy in the digital era — and especially since Apple’s introduction of the iPhone in 2007 inaugurated an era in which smartphones became remarkably intimate companions of people everywhere.
“Law enforcement has an enormous range of technical and old-fashioned methods to go after the perpetrators of real crime, and no amount of security effort at Silicon Valley tech companies is going to change that fact,” said Peter Eckersley, director of technology projects at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group based in San Francisco. “The reality is that if the FBI really wants to investigate someone, they have a spectacular arsenal of weapons.”
However, sometimes, police say, that’s not enough.
Sometimes, police say, that’s not enough.